I owe you an apology for my tone in my item #10. I have allowed you to draw me into your arena, and that is my error. This discussion degenerated when you immediately launched into an attack on me and also presented a parallel promotion of the Catholic Church that came out of left field--it is a subject that I should have avoided because I know that you will never relent. I do not expect you to understand or accept Matthew 12:46-50, and I know how you will be obliged to interpret those verses. There is nothing that I can do about this. As for the statement about forbidding to marry, since you will not let that go and you force my hand, this is what I said: “Forbidding men (your priests) to marry has no Biblical foundation, none. A...

10. Your suspiciously “kind” sympathy for me reeks of your deceit and your smug presumed superiority. Surely you must understand by now that we have precious little in common. I can only hope that God’s amazing grace has done its work in you as it has done in me and caused you to be born again. I would be delighted and cheerfully embarrassed to find that we had the Lord Jesus Christ in common and that these other disagreements were superficial. I certainly have not arrived at all knowledge…far, far from it. But I do know the Lord, and I know that He changed me according to His own good pleasure in His own time for His own purposes. Those purposes do not include the promotion of the Roman Catholic Church. You will hear me promote...

6. You then began a process of denial of the very teachings I researched and discovered in approved Catholic literature. I cannot discuss things with you if you cannot and will not admit to the historically documented teachings of the Catholic Church. 7. If your beloved Church of Rome was THE church, it is quite reasonable to assume that when the Lord addresses seven selected churches (identified by the various cities through their names) in the Book of Revelation, that Rome would have mentioned in that special context. It was not. There certainly were references to Rome in the New Testament, but none point to a church with any kind of special spiritual authority…not once, whether it be Rome, Antioch, Jerusalem, Corinth,...

It is one day later, and my job has permitted me to return a day earlier than I expected. (Some of us do work, I hope you realize.) The tactics of compulsive & obsessive posters such as yourself are always the same—you throw out bait for someone to take so you can argue, you get whipped soundly, you throw out more bait, the process repeats itself, others eventually tire of the unproductive futility, and when we depart in disgust you claim victory because you see yourself as the last man standing. Let me give you another possibility: you are boring and irrelevant. Nevertheless, I will play your game yet one more time, giving you what you so desire: attention. 1. Cannot take the heat? You have no heat. You are a pedant when...

Sword...The appetite for quarreling by some is insatiable. Every time their protective bubble is punctured they switch to a new tactic, always trying to appear to be the dominant voice. Addressing them is an exercise in absolute futility. After two attempts I then ignore all their posts, knowing their tactics and not willing to further waste my time. I'm off the boards now for a few days or longer. I wish you the best.

Chi Chaz...My apologies for including the argument possibility, but often posters have questionable motives. You are obviously sincere, and this is much appreciated. I had laid our more of my thoughts, so it was easier for you to guess where I was coming from. Because I thought you were sincere, this was why I tried to give your question a decent answer in the first place. There is a passage of Scripture (1 Corinthians 11:19) that states there must be disagreements (divisions and factions), and passages such as 1 John 2:19 again point out that there will be differences...some irreconcilable. So, from this we should at least understand that even the first century Christians had no illusions of full agreement on all matters--and...

Chi Chaz...Hard to tell if you are asking an innocent question or looking for an argument. If it's the former, I can address that. If it's the latter, we'll get nowhere. Originally, and I mean in first century Christianity, there was one church and there were many churches. There was one church in that anyone and everyone who received Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior was part of His church, or His "body" as the Bible also states in places to use an accepted metaphor. Christ is the "head" (the leader, etc.) and believers are members of His body--the spiritual extensions. There were also the local churches (plural), with each town comprised of one church, but Christ had not been divided. For organizational purposes, (selection of...

Sword...I appreciate your thoughts and understand your reservations that I fully share. I had to break my own rules to enter the discussion, but silence would have wrongly been taken as concession. As an aside, you might find this interesting: During my bookstore days in 1980-1983 I had many interesting encounters. One involved a Baptist preacher who ordered a Bible for a fellow preacher and wanted the cover imprinted with Reverend "____". I told him that I could not do this, that God alone was to be revered. I figured if a case was to be made against use of the word "Father", then an equal case existed with use of the word Reverend. He smiled after a brief but polite objection, and then allowed me to imprint the name only. A...

(11) Forbidding men (your priests) to marry has no Biblical foundation, none. A man may personally choose not to marry and to serve the Lord in that capacity, but this is not a religious mandate. (12) When the literature I received left out the second of the Ten Commandments and expanded one of the others (the 10th) into two separate commandments to get around some of your church’s religious practices...well, let's just say by then I had already seen enough. (By the way, your Catholic Bible itself does in fact have all of the Ten Commandments. Yes, I used your Bible for this related research.) I can meet a Chinese Christian, an African Christian, or an Indian Christian and soon know that I am with a brother in the Lord. With...

I was not going to reply, as I expected that that you would answer in the way that you did. Your presumed superior tone gives you away immediately. However, because you impugned my integrity and my judgment—and therefore my faith, for the sake of others I will mention just a few errors/problems that I read in the literature that I purchased from the Catholic bookstore. Others then can do their own research if interested. Incidentally, I approached this with no anti-Catholic bias—I was searching out truth at the time, and I found it lacking in Roman Catholic teachings, as have countless others. (1) Salvation is not by works. In fact, Roman Catholic doctrine is astoundingly amiss when it comes to presenting how a person is saved. ...