***Disallowing marriage is ABNORMAL and scripturally condemned, and disobeying clear scripture always causes problems. ***
Take it up with Saint Paul, then. He openly told about himself being celibate, and that it was a preferred state of being.
***I realized I was not a Protestant - and a lifetime of observation of organized “religion” and a lot of its rotten fruit - I’ve decided that I’m just a Christian - period ***
How did you arrive at your beliefs; how do you interpret Scripture; how do you recognize the metaphor from the literal?
DISALLOWING MARRIAGE is abnormal and not the place of any human being to make laws concerning another. Of course, Paul advised that we not marry because in marriage we would have tribulation. There is NT scripture that condemns the sects that would come later “forbidding marriage” and that we were to stay away from those. If the priests were allowed to marry after they become priests, it would probably solve a lot of the sexual problems amongst priests in the Catholic Church.
I am 61 years old. I have been through too much in a lifetime to even try to go into the amount of detail it would take to explain how I arrived at my beliefs.
For starters, it probably began centuries before I was born. My people were French Huguenot - Maupins - who were driven out of France by Catholic priests who were slaughtering and persecuting the Huguenot Protestants there in that era. They found sanctuary in Holland, and then in England where they gained land grants in America from the King of England for their service to the crown. So, you see, Catholic priests have always had a goodly number of rotten apples amongst their numbers.
From a personal perspective, I’ve seen enough of the Protestant preacher and wife power couple pocketing two-thirds of the total church income (with the blessings of a fearful congregation not wishing to cross a “man of God”). Then there was my mother-in-law introducing me to the “charismatic movement” back in the 70’s and 80’s, until I questioned the “get rich quick with Jesus” basic foundation of what the prosperity teachers were hawking. - Then, later, there were the few years I spent in the Greek Orthodox Church which labeled itself as more the American Orthodox Church - at first - then slowly, every time the bishop came over from Syria, or wherever, the services began to get more and more Greek in nature, and to center more on the Virgin Mary than upon Jesus Christ. I realized that I wasn’t physically able to stand for a three hour service every week, and more importantly, I realized I WASN’T GREEK! Just as I am not ROMAN either!
This is just a brief synopsis of where I am and how I got here. As to the exterior, I have chosen to dress modestly and wear the Christian headcovering that Paul also taught.
I realize there isn’t a perfect solution to “where to go for fellowship with the Church”, so I just fellowship with those who call upon the name of Christ whenever I can - but so far, the unstable “preacher centered” fellowships I’ve found lately are usually in a state of some sort of chaos or the other. So, I go along and do the best I can daily.
I choose to wear no label, but hope that the Lord and anyone I might come in contact with would see me as a simple Christian person in word and deed, in spirit and in truth.