It's All About Reason?

My brother insists that his “faith” in his Catholicism is “all about reason.” But if that is true, then his definition of “reason” is different than my own. Reason leads me to ask questions that expose something as false, while for him, reason only leads him to rationalize why his Catholicism must be true. Asking questions is how the owner of Home Depot decided that Bernie Madoff was selling lies that were too good to be true. If, because he wanted to "believe" that Madoff would make him richer than God, the owner of Home Depot only wanted to ask those questions that would serve to confirm his "belief" that Madoff was telling the truth, he would only be using a kind of "reason" that is but a puppet on the string of a confirmation bias for a belief. Asking questions that are unchained from such a confirmation bias and a need to "believe" is the only defense we have agaisnt charlatanism. My brother made a decision that Catholicism was infallibly "true" when he was 13 years old, via the sacrament of Confirmation, a good decade before the part of his brain that is required to exerise reason had even fully developed. But that doesn't matter to him. He "knows" me made the right choice before his brain had a chance to fully form its capacity for reason, even though his parents made sure he'd never been exposed to anything other than Catholicism at that point, because he "knows" Catholicism just MUST be true. Why? Beause "reason" proves it is. It does? Really? So I guess anyone who has ever come to a different conclusion is an idiot that deserves to be tortured for eternity for their stupidity. This, by the way, includes roughly 70% or more if the entire human race today, even after God's "plan" has had more than 2000 years to "cure" our species of such spiritual stupidity. That makes perfect sense. NOT. SO what the hell does he think "reason" even is?! Philosophically, reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is the “faculty or process of drawing logical inferences.” Applying such reason requires at least two things. The first is a voracious curiosity and the second is a willingness to allow that curiosity to lead us to whatever “truth” it may lead, NOT the “truth” we prefer, in order to keep our chestnuts out of God's eternal camp fire. For St. Augustine, curiosity was only a “good thing” when it limited itself to only searching for ways to validate a “belief” in St. Augustine’s definition of “God.” Curiosity exercised to investigate anything else was, according to Augustine, “a disease.” In this, Augustine broke sharply with the Greek philosophers who he drew all of his ideas from. For the philosophers of Greece, and Rome, philosophical investigation was the highest form of piety. It was even understood to be a form of prayer. This view went all the way back to Socrates, whose life of philosophical questioning was what led the Oracle at Delphi to call Socrates “the wisest man in all of Greece.” Everyone else was simply a "believer" in the gods of Greece, while Socrates dared to question such a sacred assumption. (My brother must therefore hate that satanic Socrates!) Plutarch, in his book “On Isis and Osiris,” explained that philosophical piety and religion were merely different ways of reaching the same truth, with Isis being “wisdom” and Osiris being the search for truth. But this was ONLY true as long as both were starting without a vested interest in only finding evidence for one's "beliefs." Augustine changed this when he decided that his own belief in his own brand of “God” was the only truth there was, and anyone who said anything different deserved to be tortured out of a love for his own God and the damned souls of those idiots who couldn't see how right he was. This devotion to the idea that a particular brand of “god” is the only truth one must devote their life to defending, which requires only striving to interpret evidence in ways that supports such a belief, is the greatest sin against the search for truth there is. Today, my brother is convinced that his devotion to defending the brand of “truth” being sold by his Catholic religion is the only way he can save himself from the hell of having to admit he could ever be wrong about his Catholicism. To save himself from such a hell, he crucifies reason to a cross and calls it “truth.” That’s the furthest thing from “reason” I can imagine. But I guess the real difference is that reason to me leads me to question, while reason to him leads him to believe his beliefs are infallible.