re: Pope reminds us during Palm Sunday mass that war is not Christian

Saying Catholics aren’t Christians might be the dumbest thing I’ve read on here in months.

And the Israelis are preventing Christians from celebrating in Jerusalem? The Israelis are also kicking Christian’s off their land in the West Bank. That shite goes both ways bud. Both of those religions despise Christians.

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Didn’t you know? Christ appeared 2000 years ago but Christian’s didn’t show up until 1500 years later during the reformation. There were no Christian’s on the earth for 1500 years because we all know Catholics are not Christians.

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While Roman Catholics are nominally Christian, the concern many Protestant Christians have is that they formally deny the gospel of Jesus Christ as taught in the Scriptures.

The Council of Trent not only rejects the biblical teaching of justification by faith in Christ alone but says that anyone who believes it is under an anathema. As much as post-Vatican II Rome tries to market herself as loving and tolerant of her estranged brethren (Protestants), they have yet to remove that anathema.

According to what Rome teaches about salvation, a consistent Muslim has a better shot at salvation than I do, because while I still worship the same trinitarian God as Catholics, and while I affirm the apostles creed, believe in doing good works out of love, love God’s word in the Bible, and believe that salvation is through Jesus Christ and not in Mohammed or any other name, I’m damned because I knowingly and willingly reject certain extra-biblical dogmas that Rome says I am compelled to believe.

Apparently I would have been better off to have been born in the Middle East to Muslim parents who taught me to hate Christians than to be born to Protestant parents who taught me to love my enemies as Christ did and still does, because my rejection of Rome (but not the God-man Jesus Christ) means that I am damned.

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While Roman Catholics are nominally Christian, the concern many Protestant Christians have is that they formally deny the gospel of Jesus Christ as taught in the Scriptures.

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Ah returned to a passive aggressive stance on Catholicism

Not wanting to piss on the grave of St Peter is a good start!

You’re throwing a lot out there, but most of it still comes down to the same issue… reading modern assumptions into ancient texts and then acting like that’s what the Bible says.

First, on the “you think you interpret it right and everyone else is wrong” point. That’s actually what you’re doing. The difference is Catholics don’t rely on private interpretation. We rely on Scripture as understood within the Church that produced, preserved, and canonized it. That’s not arrogance, that’s consistency.

Second, the “firmament / flat earth” argument is a category mistake. The Bible uses phenomenological language, describing things as they appear, not giving a modern scientific treatise. You’re taking poetic and observational language and forcing a literalist reading where it was never intended.

Third, on Numbers 5. You’re still asserting something the text never explicitly says. The passage describes a curse resulting from guilt, not a priest performing an abortion. Even your argument admits the outcome is conditional and tied to divine judgment, not a human-controlled procedure. Calling it a “magic abortion potion” is more rhetoric than exegesis.

Fourth, on the Canaanite issue. You keep trying to force a false dilemma: either God is evil or you endorse human violence. That’s not the claim. The claim is that God, as the author of life, has authority over life and death that humans do not. You may not like that distinction, but dismissing it isn’t refuting it.

Fifth, on “God never changes.” Correct. But revelation unfolds. The same God who judged nations in the Old Testament is the one who reveals the fullness of moral teaching in Christ. That’s not contradiction, that’s development. Christianity has always read the Old Testament through the lens of Christ.

Finally, the irony here is strong. You accuse Catholics of picking and choosing while rejecting the authority of the Church, questioning apostolic authorship when it suits you, and redefining passages to fit your framework. That’s not avoiding selection… that is selection.

So no, this isn’t about making excuses. It’s about actually understanding what the text is, how it was written, and how it has been understood historically… instead of forcing it into a modern reading and calling that “plain.”

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Nominally? If you are saying Catholics aren’t Christian you are starting the conversation from a disingenuous standpoint.

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I’m making a distinction between the profession of faith in Jesus—professing the Christian religion—and confessing what I believe is another gospel.

Yes, nominally, Catholics are Christian. They profess the Christian religion. They have the ancient creeds. They have the Scriptures. It’s like Paul speaking of his Jewish kinsmen who were separated from Christ by rejecting the gospel even though they had the “oracles of God”, the promises and the prophets.

I don’t want to get hung up on the term “nominal”, though. My main concern is for the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

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Faith alone is misconstrued. True faith and conversation of heart comes with works. Luke 19, Jesus says salvation has come to this household AFTER Zacchaeus says he will return what he stole fourfold.

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I agree with your statement. The issue is not whether or not works are included in salvation, but what is the basis of our salvation.

The biblical teaching as I see it is that faith alone receives the promise of salvation merited by Christ alone, and that good works naturally flow from that salvation.

Regeneration by the Spirit makes the elect person able and willing to believe by having a new heart and new affections, and they also now have the desire to please God by obeying what He commands, which are the good works we are commanded to do.

Do Protestants believe good works are necessary for salvation? Historically, the answer has been “yes”. But, the issue is not whether works are necessarily involved, but how they are involved.

We don’t believe that good works merit grace or provide a basis for our salvation; only Jesus’ works merit a right standing before God. We believe that good works necessarily flow from regenerated heart that is saved by God’s grace alone.

In other words, we are saved by Christ alone through faith alone, but not by faith that is alone. A saving faith—contrasted with a mere assent or intellectual faith that demons have—naturally produces good works as an evidence. Or as Jesus said, every good tree will bear good fruit.

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The Catholic Church has never declared a soul in hell. Not even Judas. There are prominent Catholics who have hope for universal salvation.

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The anathema is a declaration that if a person does not repent of that false belief being condemned, that person is in danger of being damned. The end result is the same: if one does not turn away and come back into alignment with Rome’s teachings, there is little hope of salvation.

You’re right that Rome doesn’t make infallible declarations of damnation, but the language points to hope for the Muslim because of their ignorant faith while the Protestant that knowingly and willingly rejects the dogmas of Rome should not have hope of salvation.

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Once again. The Catholic Church has not damned even Judas to hell.

However the church is firm in its belief that the Eucharist is the bread of life that leads to eternal salvation.

Their firmness in that belief isn’t mean spirited. If you believe something is the truth, you don’t bend because it hurts someone’s feelings or makes them feel left out. The doors are always open. Some of favorite Catholic and Orthodox theologians are former protestants.

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I don’t have a problem with sticking to truth, and even recognizing that some truth is so important to believe (or not reject), that salvation itself is tied to it.

The problem I have is that the gospel is the standard of truth for salvation, and Rome adds more criteria to salvation than what Jesus does, adding to what the gospel actually is.

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Did the Pope forget about the Crusades?

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First thought that came to my mind as well.

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Most of you would drop your faith tomorrow if Trump told you too

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JFC...

Nah, Trump supporters aren't nearly as emotionally invested in their support of Trump as you TDS f@gs are with your irrational and obsessive hatred of him. Nice try though, pussy.

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You’re throwing a lot out there, but most of it still comes down to the same issue… reading modern assumptions into ancient texts and then acting like that’s what the Bible says.

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My opinion is the opposite of your line of thinking and here is why. I don’t have any dogmas or preconceived ideas that must be defended. I go where the evidence leads. I think it is “you guys” (religious types) who make assumptions and presumptions and fallacious assertions of begging the question and argument from authority.

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First, on the “you think you interpret it right and everyone else is wrong” point. That’s actually what you’re doing

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We all do it. Just about everyone on this site. I do it. You do. All the religious fundamentalists of various sects and cults all think their interpretation is correct and have many reasons and apologies for their assertions. Don’t be a hypocrite. Admit that you believe your interpretation, or the interpretation you endorse without question, is an interpretation and you think you’re right.

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We rely on Scripture as understood within the Church that produced, preserved, and canonized it. That’s not arrogance, that’s consistency.

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And the reason you have exactly four gospels in your canon (out of the nearly 50 gospels of Jesus Christ recovered in the Middle East from the second and third centuries) is because in Irenaeus’ words paraphrased - there are four cardinal directions and four winds, therefore there should be exactly four gospels of Jesus Christ.

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Second, the “firmament / flat earth” argument is a category mistake. The Bible uses phenomenological language, describing things as they appear, not giving a modern scientific treatise. You’re taking poetic and observational language and forcing a literalist reading where it was never intended.

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Nah man you’re picking and choosing. Do you believe in the Noah’s ark myth? It says the windows of the firmament opened to release the “waters above”. The biblical authors wanted us to know how mighty God was to be able to build such a solid, hard as a rock, crystalline like dome structure to hold back those waters. It says God walked on the firmament. Can you spread out the skies as hard as a metal mirror? God wants to ask you that… can you???

They actually believed there were seven firmaments - each firmament named “heaven”. Paul himself wrote that he had a vision of the third heaven - whether in the body or out of the body he did not know. Look it up. To say those verses are allegorical or poetic is just simply nonsense. And the records from ancient Israel, Canaan, Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, and more tell the same story. Perhaps you had heard of the Titans in Greek mythology? One of the titans, Atlas, was thought to hold up the solid dome of the firmament. Biblical cosmology is standard middle eastern / Mediterranean cosmology. The Israelites had no special knowledge of how the world worked, in fact many educated Greeks at the time Paul wrote of visiting the third heaven actually knew the earth was a sphere and that the earth revolved around the sun. The Israelites, they just didn’t know better and didn’t have any divine knowledge.

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Third, on Numbers 5. You’re still asserting something the text never explicitly says. The passage describes a curse resulting from guilt, not a priest performing an abortion. Even your argument admits the outcome is conditional and tied to divine judgment, not a human-controlled procedure. Calling it a “magic abortion potion” is more rhetoric than exegesis.

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It is divinely controlled abortion potion. It is what it is. Read up on the rabbinic literature yourself. Don’t just take my word for it. The purpose of the test is to determine if the wife was unfaithful. The potential evidence is that she is unexpectedly (from the husband’s perspective) pregnant. The priests wouldn’t just poison a woman - she had to be pregnant. The result of the consumption of the “bitter water” (poison) is that she would carry the baby to term, or she would miscarry, or she would miscarry and die herself. The poor and uneducated (which was most of them besides the priestly class) thought it was divine judgement. In reality, the priest administering the “test” controlled the outcome based on how much carbon he would mix in to absorb the poison. The priest would scoop up some ash “dust” off the tabernacle floor - the carbon leftover from burnt animal sacrifices - and mix it in with the poison. More carbon - better chances she pulls through and doesn’t miscarry.

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Fourth, on the Canaanite issue. You keep trying to force a false dilemma: either God is evil or you endorse human violence. That’s not the claim. The claim is that God, as the author of life, has authority over life and death that humans do not. You may not like that distinction, but dismissing it isn’t refuting it.

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So… it sounds like you endorse God unfairly killing innocent people and babies, simply because you claim he has authority to do so.