Musings on the Catholic confusion in this atheist debate

Still working on the previous post, but wanted to get this in here somewhere. Dinesh D'Souza is a Catholic, and although he's a very bright and knowledgeable guy who has come up with some of the best arguments in this debate with atheism, in the course of it he's constrained to defend Catholicism, including diminishing the crime of the Inquisition.

In Part Five of a debate with Hitchens {earlier than the one previously discussed here) [1:22 - 3:28] Hitchens specifically accuses Catholicism of fascist politics, naming Mussolini, Salazar, Franco, Father Tiso and another name I couldn't get. Hitler hated Christianity but his nominal Catholicism shouldn't be ignored in this tally. I think in Hitchens' very tallying of the Catholic leaders who pursued the fascist cause there is possibly a revelation of the antichrist spirit of the Roman church that I hadn't been aware of before. I was aware that priests had conspired to help Nazis escape from Germany after the war, among other things (Dave Hunt's books describe much in this direction that I've forgotten), but I'd never put it together before with the essential antichrist nature of the Roman church. Definitely something I want to think about more.

Dinesh simply accuses Hitchens of taking the focus off the secular totalitarians, but there really is something startling about the degree of Catholic involvement that Hitchens has just laid out that needs to be acknowledged -- and not merely acknowledged -- it's a sign of the apostate anti-Christian nature of the Roman Church and we should probably be looking more in that direction as the end times continue to unfold. Remember, the Catholic Church has embraced evolutionism and regards Creationists as moronic fundamentalists, and that's just a small part of the worldly system it's embraced in its ambition to global power.

And of course because he IS a Catholic, poor Dinesh can't keep his focus clear on the elements of this debate and that's sad, but what's sadder is that he really does not know Christ, really is not saved, has only an intellectual grasp of the Christian revelation. By part 9 of this series D'Souza is saying he has faith because he does not know, pretty much demonstrating that he doesn't really have true faith as a born-again believer understands it, and this unfortunately contributes to the confusion that gives credibility to Hitchens' position. Faith IS the evidence of things unseen, and if we have true faith we DO know the things we have faith in. We KNOW the things faith shows us. Dinesh is affirming a leap-in-the-dark definition of faith because all he really has is mental assent, and that's unfortunately the case for the vast majority of Catholics, and really probably for all, as Catholicism cannot save. If there are true Christians in that church, the Lord says "Come out of her, My people."

Dinesh also wrongly equated Judaism with the Old Testament and described it as a religion only for the tribe, as if it had just about nothing to do with Christianity. He did this in agreement with something Hitchens said, about how Christianity is a rip-off of Judaism, a plagiarism. Thanks, Dinesh, for not correcting that misapprehension. But I guess he's stuck in a Catholic misapprehension. And it's interesting that it sounds a lot like what Hitler thought of the Old Testament -- evil religion, religion of the Jews. Does Dinesh have no sense at all of the seamless whole of the Bible, the fulfillment of the Old in the New, the continuity from Eden to Revelation? Sounds like he hasn't a clue. Judaism is not Old Testament religion, Judaism is Talmudic religion. the man-made tradition of the Pharisees that Jesus kept condemning that had supplanted the revelation of God. The Old Testament on the other hand is testimony to the one true God and the Jews were supposed to carry this testimony to all mankind. That's what Jesus ended up doing in their stead.

Hitchens and other atheists are rightly confused about what Christianity really teaches when they hear stuff like this, when they have to regard Catholicism as just as much Christianity as any other sect, having no ground for making a distinction, and not caring to make one anyway of course, happy to tar us all with the sins of our worst enemies, the Roman Church, Islam -- even their sins against us.

In part 6 of that debate a questioner says he thinks both Christians and atheists alike agree that morality evolved anthropologically. [around 8:50] Oh wow, has it gone that far that he thinks he can speak for all Christians about that? It's not just Catholics but great numbers of those who regard themselves as evangelicals who have been infected by evolutionism.