“The Devil Himself Believes in God”!

According to John Counsell, “the Devil himself believes in God.” Thus starts another Ottawa Citizen “Ask the Religion Experts” column, “What does it mean to ‘believe’? Must belief be absolute?” Counsell also says, “Absolute belief is meaningless on its own,” but Counsell’s words are meaningless as usual. Ignore him. You are marginally better off to take advice from John Fletcher, a Catholic pastor in the Ottawa area.

Fletcher looked up the word believe in the Webster dictionary. Couldn’t Fletcher find a more scholarly text?  What text he uses doesn’t really matter because as he says, “To believe in God means to accept the fact that God exists.” However, despite the attempts of Augustine, Wittgenstein and Chesterton, the fact that God exists has never been proven.  Worse still is Fletcher’s parting warning,

But the ordinary means of salvation is through faith in Jesus Christ and baptism.

which means if you are not Catholic/Christian, you are dammed.

Kevin Smith, member of the the board of directors for the Centre for Inquiry, “Canada’s premier venue for humanists, skeptics and freethinkers” and rational thought, doesn’t agree. He

admit[s] to being in the moral minority — yet there are millions of us, whom Blaise Pascal referred to as, “so made that they cannot believe.” We are identified by the term “unbeliever”, a word whose definition is perpetuated as negative by those who embrace their positive torch of belief.

He doesn’t believe in God because he knows

The gods of today, and those of the ages who lie in unmarked graves, are obliged to offer one consistent promise in order to exist. Believers would worship them at any cost, even death, for which they would be guaranteed eternal redemption.

The responses of the experts who are believers are unbelievable and unsupported.  Thank you Ottawa Citizen for allowing them to make that very obvious.