What I do here, when I can, is give enough context so that we can separate out the overbearing and rash conspiracies against Catholicism and focus on the well-established ones. To some that looks like defense. But when I arrived at Win/Scored in 2021 I saw a need to defend everyone who upholds the classic Christian creeds, and there do seem to be many in the Roman Catholic church who know Jesus and serve him and who are doing his work in his body alongside the rest of us. I can't say what percentage that is but it's between 0% and 100%, like any other denomination.
So if a Catholic says "it's Mary's birthday" we call that out. If he says "I said it was Mary's birthday but we really don't know", or if he says "Geez", we call that out. But when the Catholic Encyclopedia says there's evidence that people started to celebrate Mary's conception on 9 Dec somewhere in the 5th to 7th centuries and they picked a date on their own", there's nothing necessarily false or problematic there. My pointing that out might look like defense, but it's just what the Scored platform policy seems to me, high energy, no racism, no dilution, etc.
I checked your profile quickly and found pretty much only the civil criticism of Catholicism accompanied by evidentiary fact bases that I look for from rational minds. I haven't watched all the videos of course so it's possible I might find a proposition there I'd want to peel back a bit. As I said, in advocating for everyone who holds the creedal core taught by the Bible, I've learned to speak the Catholic language and understand why they make statements sounding so outrageous to Protestants and Orthodox; sometimes recognizing this language gap defuses a lot of the debate when people are honest. For instance, while it's true that Jesus says not to call any man father, authors of the Bible under inspiration do literally call people father, which means (necessary implication) that Jesus is speaking about a limited situation where there is further context indicating a narrower meaning of father. So my judgment is that some uses of "pope" are beyond the pale but not necessarily all. If that's defense, then you're welcome to call me on it as a fellow Bible student. I'm sure you have some zingers I'm likely to be very interested in.
People get confused when I say as a Protestant that I'm a "little-c catholic" and that means I believe in a universal church. Well, little-c catholic is the Apostles' Creed, and it summarizes the Greek phrase kath holes that appears 6 times in the Bible, translated as "throughout all". So I believe in the throughout-all church, the cataholistic church if you will, and some of its members appear to still be in communion with Rome and to still be doing good work. But I could be wrong.
Just to add on, if I may; as I understand it, we would find something wrong (even a little) everywhere and I also agree to the definition of universal church. (For anyone that doesn't already know, I don't like denominations but I also really don't like division so I keep looking for the peacemakers and keep trying to find common ground)
What I do here, when I can, is give enough context so that we can separate out the overbearing and rash conspiracies against Catholicism and focus on the well-established ones. To some that looks like defense. But when I arrived at Win/Scored in 2021 I saw a need to defend everyone who upholds the classic Christian creeds, and there do seem to be many in the Roman Catholic church who know Jesus and serve him and who are doing his work in his body alongside the rest of us. I can't say what percentage that is but it's between 0% and 100%, like any other denomination.
So if a Catholic says "it's Mary's birthday" we call that out. If he says "I said it was Mary's birthday but we really don't know", or if he says "Geez", we call that out. But when the Catholic Encyclopedia says there's evidence that people started to celebrate Mary's conception on 9 Dec somewhere in the 5th to 7th centuries and they picked a date on their own", there's nothing necessarily false or problematic there. My pointing that out might look like defense, but it's just what the Scored platform policy seems to me, high energy, no racism, no dilution, etc.
I checked your profile quickly and found pretty much only the civil criticism of Catholicism accompanied by evidentiary fact bases that I look for from rational minds. I haven't watched all the videos of course so it's possible I might find a proposition there I'd want to peel back a bit. As I said, in advocating for everyone who holds the creedal core taught by the Bible, I've learned to speak the Catholic language and understand why they make statements sounding so outrageous to Protestants and Orthodox; sometimes recognizing this language gap defuses a lot of the debate when people are honest. For instance, while it's true that Jesus says not to call any man father, authors of the Bible under inspiration do literally call people father, which means (necessary implication) that Jesus is speaking about a limited situation where there is further context indicating a narrower meaning of father. So my judgment is that some uses of "pope" are beyond the pale but not necessarily all. If that's defense, then you're welcome to call me on it as a fellow Bible student. I'm sure you have some zingers I'm likely to be very interested in.
People get confused when I say as a Protestant that I'm a "little-c catholic" and that means I believe in a universal church. Well, little-c catholic is the Apostles' Creed, and it summarizes the Greek phrase kath holes that appears 6 times in the Bible, translated as "throughout all". So I believe in the throughout-all church, the cataholistic church if you will, and some of its members appear to still be in communion with Rome and to still be doing good work. But I could be wrong.
Just to add on, if I may; as I understand it, we would find something wrong (even a little) everywhere and I also agree to the definition of universal church. (For anyone that doesn't already know, I don't like denominations but I also really don't like division so I keep looking for the peacemakers and keep trying to find common ground)