Expert: Marco - 11/15/2011

Question
Why is islam false? also why is Catholicism the true religion,

thanks!

Answer
Dear Ramiro,

to believe in one religion rather than another is always a personal choice, but I think that there are some objective elements, distinguishing the different religions (their history, theology, etc.) that can be analysed from a rational point of view. I limit myself to a couple of considerations. In the times when peoples used to worship many gods, represented with anthropomorphic idols, usually associated with natural elements, there were only one monotheistic people who worshipped one God of Spirit and rigorously prohibited any representations of God. This monotheistic concept of God has appeared in history through the jews and every monotheistic religion cannot but acknowledge its roots in the Bible.
There is another importtant objective element to be considered. Through christianity, an absolutely new concept of divine love has come into history: the concept of a God who loves us so much that He makes Himself man and accepts an atrocious suffering and death in order to save us from our sinful and unhappy existence and lead us to the true and eternal happiness.


Why was it necessary that Jesus suffered so much to save us from our sins? Couldn't He simply save us without being crucified?


I believe that each of us needed know that God was willing to accept such a terrible suffering for us, in order to really trust God. Every man needed that proof of love, and God, who knew this, has accepted to give him what man consciously or unconsciously asked to Him. Jesus had to suffer and die that way to convince us about God's goodness and God's love towards us. It is man's obstinate distrust against God that has forced God to give man that proof of love, the proof he needed to trust God. By His death on the cross, Jesus destroys our distrust and our doubts, and He gives us the strength to believe in Him and trust Him. This means that each of us is personally responsible of Jesus ' sufferings and death. This distrust, this lack of faith in God, as well as the excess of trust in oneself, is just the essence of the original sin. Blinded by his pride, man rejects God's authority and prefers to trust himself, instead of His Creator; man deludes himself to be able to be independent from God, to be the god of himself. But God only is the source of all true good and true love. Man is unable to pursue the true good with his only strengths; man needs God, His teachings, His spiritual help, and so, after his rebellion against God, he gets deeper and deeper into a vortex of sin, which he can get out of only if he allow God to change his evil and impure heart. God in fact loves us infinitely, and He desires to lead each of us to the true life and true happiness, a condition existing only in God. But God cannot tolerate evil and sin, because they are incompatible with His good and holy nature. A deep interior change is then necessary for all of us to reach the eternal happiness; we must be sanctified and purified from all our evil and sinful desires. God has the power to change us but He wants to do that with our consent. Since He has chosen to create man with a free will, He wants to respect our will. Man cannot really accept to be changed by God and he cannot be in comunion with God as long as even a shadow of doubt and distrust remains in his heart ( it must be stressed that such a distrust may exist even without the man is aware of it, at the unconscious level). God had to destroy every shadow of doubt and distrust in our heart and He has chosen to give us the greatest proof of love that may exist: Christ's Passion. Christ's Passion has reconciled us to God because it has uprooted from our heart, our distrust and doubts about God; it has satisfied our (conscious or unconscious) desire and need of a proof of love, so that it has given us the strength to trust God and feel loved by Him.

Of course, if you accept the chritian concept of divine love, you must accept the divine nature of Christ, which concept is striking rejected by islam and the Koran.
The rejection of the divine nature of Christ is in my opinion the most important reason to reject islam.


There are many different christian denominations; are there any scientific criteria to establish which is the true christianity?


No, but I think that some rational criteria can be used. The fact that there are many different protestant denominations, professing different doctrines and interpretations of the Bible, proves that the Bible is not unequivocally understandable by everybody. This is an objective result. Every protestant usually claims that his interpretations are inspired by the Holy Spirit, and therefore they are true, but he has no objective element to support such a claim; he simply assumes that his opinions are inspired by the Holy Spirit. The point is that the Holy Spirit cannot contradicts Himself, and therefore these contrasting interpretations can certainly neither be all true, nor all inspired by the Holy Spirit. The concept of divine love implies that, after Jesus' ascent to heaven, God cannot have abandoned us to our uncertain interpretations; God must be present in every time to go on teaching us the Truth and the moral law. This is the reason why Jesus has founded His Church; He gave us a visible guide to lead us to the Truth, so that we were not misled by our wrong interpretations and opinions. The existence of many different protestant denominations, interpreting the Bible in different ways, objectively proves that the Bible is not a sufficient guide for man. On the other man, if Jesus had wanted to found the christian faith on a book, He would have written it Himself; but Jesus never wrote anything. The New Testament has been written some decades after Christ, and the first christian communities had no New Testament, but they founded their faith only on the oral teachings of the Church. Among the several christian confessions, catholicism is the only one that has an historical continuity with Christ, through the apostolic succession that connects the present Pope to Peter. Peter is in fact the only apostole whom Jesus gave the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Mt 16:17), which proves that Jesus gave Peter a special role in His Church; it must be stressed that this delivery of the keys is the first act done by Jesus soon after He founded His Church, which proves the existence of a fundamental relation between these keys and the Church. Observe that no historical continuity exists between Christ and the protestant denominations or other christian confessions; Christ never appeared to Luther or Calvin, etc. All these confessions rose more than 1500 years after Christ.

Don't the errors commited in the past by the Church (for example, Galileo) undermine the authority of the Church?


I believe that God has created man with a free will, and therefore each man can commit sins and he is responsible of his own sins. God does not take away automatically the free will to all those who become priests, bishops or popes. This means that each person can commit some sins, even a pope, but the responsibility of these sins is however personal, and not of the Church. The Pope is considered infallible by the Catholic Church only when he proclaims officially a definitive doctrine in matter of faith and moral; a pope is not considered infallible in his personal decisions or in his scientific opinions. God's love assures us that the official teachings of the Church, the ones contained in the Cathechism, are certainly truthful and trustworthy; it is God Himself who vouches for these teachings, in the same way He inspired the authors of the Bible, authors who were not without sin. It must be considered that some corrupted men have been in the Church of Christ since the very beginning. In fact, Judas Iscariot was one of the apostoles; he was sent by Jesus to preach and to do miracles in His name. Nevertheless, Judas betrayed Jesus, but this certainly does not mean that the Church of Christ was corrupted. In the Gospel of Matthew 16:18, Jesus Himself says that the gates of Hades shall not prevail against the Church; this means that Jesus Himself vouches for the teachings of His Church. Besides, Paul writes that the Church is "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1Tm 3:15). Protestants consider as corrupted many teachings of the Catholic Church, which orgin is well recorded since the first centuries after Christ. This would mean that God abandoned humanity to a corrupted church, teaching evil and sinful doctrines, for many centuries, up to the sixteenth century, when protestantism rose. This hypothesis is uncompatible with Matthew and 1Timothy verses, as well as with the concept of divine love. é

I hope this may help,

Your brother in Christ,

Marco