Posted on 01/03/2010 1:53:57 PM PST by NYer
Well said. May God bless your testimony.
The reason being that I had already found enough error to make reading the rest of it a waste of time.
You site fundamentalists beliefs, state that Catholics of course agree with them, then comes the big BUT. You then go on to say the almost opposite of what fundamentalists believe. Which is it? I say it is just a tactic of yours, done on purpose.
Either the bible is the Word of God or it isn't. The book itself says it is. Either you believe that or you are not a Christian. It is not debatable. The bible can't be just GENERALLY the Word of God. If you can pick and choose what in it you want to believe, then it is WORTHLESS.
To suggest that the Holy Spirit can't interpret the bible is blasphemy. Maybe you should rethink that one.
I'm a born and raised Catholic. In college (Cornell), my faith went into a luke warm period. I met a girl who was a Baptist and started attending Baptist church and weeknight prayer meetings with her.
I met quite a few students who had been genuinely saved from drug, sexual issues and alcohol. Their faith was alive and very refreshing (as is the case with anyone who is saved).
However, a large minority (30-40%) of the students that I met were not Baptists for its positive attributes, but rather were Baptists because they were strongly anti-Catholic. Some of them had had bad experiences with an individual Catholic authority, but well over half of the anti-Catholics had no experience with Catholicism whatsoever and had been taught their Catholic hatred, including the girl of interest.
At about the fourth prayer meeting that I had attended (about 150 students), the leader of the prayer meeting, a Baptist minister, went into a long anti-Catholic rant. It was rather hateful, complete with labelling ther Pope as Satan, that Catholics worship multiple gods and other similar lies. He was encouraged by booing from the audience.
Afterwards I talked to people about it and how wrong the minister was. But they got angry at me and claimed "I've seen Catholics stand up at Mass and yell out their worship for saints!" At 20 years old, I had attended Mass over 1000 times and had NEVER seen anything even close to such a display. And as a semi-intelligent fellow, I knew what the role of the Pope and the saints were, and they are NOT any kind of deity to any Catholic. But nobody wanted to hear what an experienced Catholic had seen, they wanted reinforcement of the hate. It was astonishing.
I left that prayer meeting knowing that I could never return to a group that WANTED to hate and live a lie about Catholics. Maybe it was just the northeast, maybe it was the age group, but the hate for Catholicism was pretty common. I will never have anything bad to say about Baptists for the good that had happened to those who had fallen, but I will never be able to participate with those who are led by hate.
Sorry to hear about your experience. Obviously mine have been different...don’t know if it is because I’ve generally lived out west, or not.
I read Mathew 18 and did not find purgatory anywhere in there. Maybe this is the point where Catholics let the “church” tell you what the bible says and believe them and myself being a fundamentalist can read, understand, and interpret the bible myself with the help of the Holy Spirit.
If you blindly believe what “the church” tells you, how do you know what they tell you is the truth? In Islam you are not allowed to question the faith. What are they afraid of? The truth?
Yes, Jesus is the Living Word of God. The Holy Scripture is the written Word of God from which Jesus Himself taught. We worship Jesus and we live by His written Word. Just wanted to clarify, since we don’t actually worship “a book”. We do revere God’s written Word, but I doubt there are very many Christians who bow down or pray to “a book”. We defer to the Scriptures; a church’s teachings must come from God’s Word and not the other way around.
Given the infinite references to scriptured contained in official Catholic documents and the constant proclamation of the Word for 2000 years throughout the world each day at Mass and through the Divine Office (daily liturgy of the hours), how can you claim that the Catholic Church ignores scripture?
While the Catholic Church interprets scipture differently than you do, it does not ignore scripture.
I’m a lifelong Baptist and can’t remember anyone in my church ever mentioning Catholics at all.
No, all are not. Witness the disgusting, smirky attitude of your co-religionists to fellow conservatives because they aren't sophisticated enough to believe in evolution.
I was one too.
How many of those people would have converted if they had known in what great contempt most American Catholics hold them (as witnessed by the snobbery on this thread)?
I hope you're enjoying your evolution.
I used to regularly watch the sunday morning services of a very prominent Southern Baptist preacher. In years of listening Catholics were alluded to perhaps one time (and not by the preacher but by someone else). When I joined the Catholic Church I discovered a hostility whose existence I didn't even know existed. Articles in Catholic magazines, tracts in the back of the church, and whole books were devoted to attacking those awful, ignorant, bigoted, inbred Fundamentalists. I decided that American Catholics are far more obsessed with Fundamentalists than Fundamentalists are with them.
The American Catholic church is too gentrified, too intellectual, and too urban to give a whit about the rural Protestant people of America. They are "the enemy" and that's about it.
This “contempt” you speak of, do you have something factual to back this up? How it manifests itself at the local parish level?
In 5 years of attending Mass at different parishes in South Carolina & in WV I’ve observed nothing that would validate your assertion in any form or fashion.
If being thankful for Christ, His Church, the Grace that comes to us through the Sacraments, for Mass and the joy I feel in my heart = this “evolution” you refer to, then yes, I am “enjoying” it. I am grateful for all the blessings God has poured upon our lives since I attended my 1st Mass just a few years ago.
May the Peace of Christ be with you always.
“With 70,000+ fully independent Baptist churches, you can undoubtedly find Baptist churches that teach hatred for Catholics. I encountered one in Texas that taught anyone who used any translation besides God’s KJV was damned...”
And that in a nutshell is the problem with Protestant-Evangelical Christianity.
You take one passage and do not see the words ‘purgatory’, but consider what the specific passage cited speaks of:
In Matthew 18:23, Jesus likens the Kingdom of Heaven to that of a king taking account of his servants. In this parable, we see on one hand the lesson of ‘forgive others as you have been forgiven’ (a branch of the general ‘do unto others as you would have do unto you’); but you also see another teaching as well, with regards to how the king, displeased with his servant’s behavior, placed him in prison until all of his debts were paid.
Given that the likening by Jesus of Heaven to this king, who are the servants likened to? Sinners: those still unclean may not enter Heaven, for those in Heaven have been made perfect. Yet since it is understood that those in Hell are in a state of final impenitence, why would Paul pray for his dead friend Onesiphorus in the first chapter of his second letter to Timothy (for if Onesiphorus is in Heaven, there is no need for Paul to pray that he finds the mercy of the Lord; yet if Onesiphorus is in Hell, no amount of prayer on behalf of Paul would change his fate)?
In conjunction with other verses, we see Biblical evidence for Purgatory: a place where souls undergo a period of purification before entering Heaven.
For the record, Peter cautions in his second letter - chapter 1, verse 20 - against private interpretation without the aid of the Holy Spirit. Given that the authority of the Church is that of Jesus’s, and hence divine...and given that Jesus revealed to his Apostles that the Holy Spirit will always guide them in truth (John 16:13), we see that the truth, as revealed by the Holy Spirit, is given to the Church. In other words, the truth of God’s Word, as revealed by the Holy Spirit, has been passed down by the Church through the ages.
If you have indeed been given the truth by the Holy Spirit, then you are welcome to join us at Mass at any time.
IIRC, you were Catholic for six years.
I've been a Catholic for more than half a century.
Your characterisation of the Church in America is false.
If you're looking for the word "purgatory" in Scripture, let me save you the trouble...the word is not there.
Of course, by that standard, you'll be abandoning the Trinity straight away, right?
Where would these Catholics you speak of be? The northeast?
Surely you can provide a brief sampler of a bibliography, yes?
Is this the Religion Forum? Am I allowed to mention by name the author of the tracts which used to appear under the windshield wiper of my car, and wedged into the screen-door of my home when I lived down the street from a store-front Pentecostal church?
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