Oddbean

I appreciate your willingness to examine your faith. To answer a previous question, the reason why you should always show goodwill towards everyone is to accept them where they are and try to convert them to the truth while keeping your heart open to recognizing the truth as well, wherever it may be (the Church doesn’t claim to be the only place of truth, just the fullness of truth). Joe Heschmeyer posted a video recently titled The Biblical Case for Infallibility. Since you don’t claim goodwill towards Catholics, and you seem to have a strong resentment for anything a Catholic has to say about the Church, I don’t expect you to be open to his arguments. However, since you seem dedicated to Scripture, which is admirable, I hope you review the Bible passages he references and reflect on what God is trying to tell us. https://youtu.be/2djx9lESGgA?si=zncj1SehMeYL5sfZ

OK. It took me a while to finish it with the attention that I needed to really listen and think about what the presenter was laying out. So... I agree with nearly everything he said. My one issue is that he insists that the big C Catholic Church is the "one true church." That is so demonstrably false, and my first, largest criticism of the catholic church, that it gets really hard to take much past that seriously for me. Especially in light of the current pope, who is, as I have stated, part of the satanic pedo cult and has greatly espoused a satanic doctrine based on Marxist BS (which is itself satanic), that even if the Roman Catholic church had not been yet compromised by the election of this pope, is now certainly compromised by lies, so that the truth in unity that the presenter rightly declares as necessary for The Church writ large, is not present (and is my contention that it has not been present since at least Justinian's reign). So, while agree that protestantism is a mess, the lack of acknowledgement that the current leadership of TRCC is heretical just undermines any other position that one might take in the debate that TRCC is "the one true church" that all Christians should abide in unity within.

I appreciate you taking the time to analyze the arguments thoroughly. Is there a denomination with a better claim to being the one true church than the Catholic Church? If the answer is no church can claim that, it seems to me that you have a position that contradicts scripture because there is no church we can point to that is being guarded from the gates of hell. Unless you think the community of believers is the church with authority resting in the individual to make declarations on faith and morals, however, that seems contrary to Jesus's prayer for unity since there is no way individuals will all agree. It appears to me there is no escaping recognizing authority for the sake of unity. For this reason, the Catholic Church claims it has the authority to safeguard the deposit of faith (Scripture and Tradition) for Christian unity. FWIW, even though the pope has authority, that doesn't mean he's above criticism. I am certainly critical of the pope at times. This is an example of criticism from a *cardinal* showing even very sharp public criticism is appropriate: https://newdailycompass.com/en/a-profile-of-the-next-pope-writes-cardinal