The Canon of the Bible wasn't set until 400 AD when St. Jerome finished the Vulgate.
It's the RCC that gave us the Bible.
Regarding saints, the very first creeds of the Church talked about the Communion of Saints, and that communion has always been 1) The Church Militant composed of the living on Earth. 2) The Church suffering in Purgatory and 3) The Church Triumphant in Heaven, that is, the saints of heaven. The Communion of Saints is a community first and foremost and all members of the community of saints can help each other but the Church Triumphant doesn't need help and the Church suffering has already had their judgement which means the people who needs help are the living - the Church Militant. That is why we pray to saints. The various situations they faced in life and/or the various causes the Catholic Church has deemed for them to be linked to, make them intercessors for our petitions.
It is natural for us to use intercessors in our normal daily life on Earth. We do it all the time. We may appeal to a family member to help out with problem or with a mutual friend in some sort of need. The communion of saints is basically the same thing but on the supernatural plain. If there's one thing we know about God's creation is that it is complex and God could do everything just by fiat and frankly, in one instant if God so wished, but he doesn't. He takes time and uses many mediated causes. One of those mediated causes can be Saints.
Also, there's nothing in the Bible that directly says the Trinity either. Moreover, there's nowhere in the Bible that it says the Bible is the ultimate authority and sole authority regarding Christianity. You'd think if the Christian Bible was to be like the Koran, that is, the absolute literal word of God and sole and only necessary authority, the Bible would say it like the Koran does. The Bible doesn't say that though. Far from it. When we read the NT letters, what we find is that there's a structure to the early Church with leaders and leaders on top of those leaders and ultimately, there is Peter. Peter makes the decision via a dream that the Jewish dietary laws can be abrogated even when all the other Apostles believe Christians have to follow Judaic dietary laws. (Paul wasn't Judas Iscariot's replacement. Mathias was.) The structure and the hierarchy of the RCC predated the canon of the Bible. In fact, we see the structure in ACTS when the Apostles meet to address the dietary laws.
You certainly know a lot about Catholicism or you have good copypasta.
Son of a gun, I typed out a huge message and accidentally refreshed.
Anyways, I used to be a member of the Catholic church. I took communion. It's so very obvious that most Catholics are extremely ignorant of the Bible. Tell me, why are so many Catholics liberals? I've met SO MANY Catholics that believe abortion is not murder. If you go to a non-denominational Church 99% of the people there will be based. I have yet to see any good answer from any Catholic "father" give a good excuse for the ideological fallacies in the Catholic Church.
The Bible is NOT a Catholic book. This is just another attempt to exalt the church as an authority in addition to the Bible. If the Bible is a Catholic book, why does it nowhere mention the Catholic Church? Why is there no mention of a pope, a cardinal, an archbishop, a parish priest, a nun, or a member of any other Catholic order? If the Bible is a Catholic book, why is auricular confession, indulgences, prayers to the saints, adoration of Mary, veneration of relics and images, and many other rites and ceremonies of the Catholic Church, left out of it? If the Bible is a Catholic book, how can Catholics account for the passage, "A bishop then, must be blameless, married but once, reserved, prudent, of good conduct, hospitable, a teacher...He should rule well his own household, keeping his children under control and perfectly respectful. For if a man cannot rule his own household, how is he to take care of the church of God?" (1 Tim. 3:2, 4-5). The Catholic Church does not allow a bishop to marry, while the Bible says "he must be married." Furthermore, if the Bible is a Catholic book, why did they write the Bible as it is, and feel the necessity of putting footnotes at the bottom of the page in effort to keep their subject from believing what is in the text?
If the Bible is a Catholic book..
Why does it condemn clerical dress? (Matt. 23:5-6).
Why does it teach against the adoration of Mary? (Luke 11:27-28).
Why does it show that all Christians are priests? (1 Pet. 2:5,9).
Why does it condemn the observance of special days? (Gal. 4:9-11).
Why does it teach that all Christians are saints? (1 Cor. 1:2).
Why does it condemn the making and adoration of images? (Ex. 20:4-5).
Why does it teach that baptism is immersion instead of pouring? (Col. 2:12).
Why does it forbid us to address religious leaders as "father"? (Matt. 23:9).
Why does it teach that Christ is the only foundation and not the apostle Peter? (1 Cor. 3:11).
Why does it teach that there is one mediator instead of many? (1 Tim. 2:5).
Why does it teach that a bishop must be a married man? (1 Tim. 3:2, 4-5).
Why is it opposed to the primacy of Peter? (Luke 22:24-27).
Why does it oppose the idea of purgatory? (Luke 16:26).
Why is it completely silent about infant baptism, instrumental music in worship, indulgences, confession to priests, the rosary, the mass, and many other things in the Catholic Church?
"It is natural for us to use intercessors in our normal daily life on Earth. We do it all the time. We may appeal to a family member to help out with problem or with a mutual friend in some sort of need. The communion of saints is basically the same thing but on the supernatural plain. If there's one thing we know about God's creation is that it is complex and God could do everything just by fiat and frankly, in one instant if God so wished, but he doesn't. He takes time and uses many mediated causes. One of those mediated causes can be Saints."
The difference is THOSE people are alive. Please show me where in the Bible where it instructs you to pray to anybody but God. The practice of praying to saints is based on the doctrine of intercession by saints, taught by the Catholic Church.
The Bible is clear that Mary’s unique position as the mother of Jesus did not give her any more access to God than another believer in Christ is given. Therefore, Mary is not worthy of receiving prayers from Christians. Jesus addressed this in Luke 11 by emphasizing that it’s more blessed to be a follower of Christ than to be the mother of Christ.
It is worth noting that praying to the saints is rooted on praying for the dead. Most pagan religions believe that when a person dies, the living should pray for his/her departed soul. During the syncretism of paganism and Christianity many centuries ago, this doctrine insidiously crept in the church.
Since pagans were already praying to their deities and it was hard to turn them to true worship, the adulterous church willingly compromised their beliefs to accommodate new converts. Pagans can still pray to dead people and their gods and goddesses but with a Christianized version. For example, instead of praying to the pagan mother goddess, the false church directed that they should pray to Mary, the mother of Jesus instead. They still pray to their gods and goddesses, but with a different name.
Dead people can’t pray to God anymore. They don’t even have any knowledge of the affairs of men. The Bible tells us:
“For the living know that they will die;
BUT THE DEAD KNOW NOTHING,
And they have no more reward,
For the memory of them is forgotten” (Ecclesiastes 9:5).
OUR FOCUS OF WORSHIP AND PRAYER SHOULD CENTER TO GOD and not to any dead saint.
The reason so many Catholics are liberals is because for the better part of the 20th century, around 80-90% of Catholics voted for Democrats. There were political machines throughout the east coast and the midwest that specialized in taking Italian, Irish and other Catholic immigrants right off the boat and turning them into Democrat voters. However, Roe V Wade SCOTUS decision changed that. So since 1973, Catholics have been split right down the middle. Some parishes are very liberal and some are very conservative. Unfortunately, our Catholic Bishops in the U.S. have been overwhelmingly deferential and supportive of the Democrat Party. A great many Catholics are angry about this. One of the things that is fueling the exodus out of mainline Catholic Churches to the Confraternity of St.Peter and the PPSX Catholic Churches (as well as the boom in the Eastern Orthodox Churches) has been conservative and Republican Catholics leaving mainline Catholicism.
I'll be the first to admit that Catholics do not know their faith and catechesis has been a woeful failure for about fifty years now. However, Catholics that are educated in their faith tend to know the Bible well and read it, as reading the Bible for a half hour is considered a good work and in some cases, a plenary indulgence is attached to it. btw, to pretend that it's just Catholics that are ignorant of the Bible or that all protestant faiths somehow are educating their children in Christianity is not warranted. The reality is, the average Catholic knows more about the Bible than the average Protestant Christian today. Look around.....Catholics are still attending a weekly church service in greater percentages and proportions than any Protestant denomination. In fact, the mainline Protestant denominations that made up the bulk of Christianity in America a century ago, are battling for their very continued existence. The Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians combined do not even have a million regular Church goers among them. So church going Catholics might be ignorant of the Bible but the percentage that are still going to Church vs protestants that stopped going to church decades ago is the actual comparison.
I'm not going to answer each objective you have because you can do your own homework.
I will suffice it to say this, once again, the canon of the Bible wasn't set until 400 AD. It was the RCC that gave us the Bible. There are bishops, "cardinals", nuns etc in the Bible but they don't go by those names. They go by names ecclesiastic, presbyter, deaconess etc.
Also, you seem to want to dismiss what Catholics believed, thought and did in the first centuries of Christianity as somehow "not Christian" because it doesn't fit your interpretation of what is and isn't in the Bible. Yet, it was these Catholics that gave us the Bible and formed the first Churches and spread the word throughout the Eastern and Western Roman Empire and beyond. For the record, the first time the word Catholic is used to describe the Church is by St.Ignatius of Antioch in Greece in the first century. Catholic tradition holds that it was this St. Ignatius that Jesus took as a young boy on the Sermon at the Mount saying, to enter the kingdom of God, one most be like this small child.
Anyway, the Bible isn't the only inspired writing from the first an second century. The reason why the Bible contains what it does is because it is part of public revelation meant for all humans in all places at all times. As opposed to private revelation or inspired literature that deals more with the internal workings of the Church, the interior lives of saints or the development of deposit of faith by theologians, saints and the learned. The Catholic Church holds that all public revelation ended with the Death of St. John and any Catholic writing that wasn't directly tied to someone who knew Jesus during his lifetime wouldn't be included.
I suggest these books to understand the early Church: The Didache which is the writing of the first five popes after Peter starting with Pope Linus. Adverses Heresis by St. Iraneaus. Iraneaus was a disciple of St.John along with St.Polycarp. Of course, there's always St. Augustine's Confessions, City of God, On Predestination and on the Perseverence of Saints.
Now, let me throw some bible thumping at you since you decided to do that to me: Which one of your protestant denominations instructs small children not to call their fathers, dad? Which one of you have plucked out an eye or cut off a hand because it was part of sin? Especially in the days of internet porn, are we to believe that no protestant's right hand has sinned? Then there are the passages about Jesus coming with a sword to set mother against daughter and son against father...I don't see many Protestants murdering their families over religious disputes. Jesus told Peter to "get behind me, Satan" does that mean Jesus thinks Peter is the devil or does that mean when the devil entered Judas Iscariot it was a just figure of speech? Maybe your interpretations aren't as rock solid as you think they are. Who decided what these things meant in practice? Who formed the rites and liturgies in accordance with God's will? It wasn't Protestants because Protestants didn't exist for the first 1500 years of the Church.
Furthermore, all gospels condemn divorce and remarriage. Every single one of them and even goes further and says that any one of you that marries a divorced woman, commits adultery. Jesus very clearly said that Moses only allowed divorce/remarriage because of the hardness of heart of the people. Now, tell me, which protestant denomination refuses to marry divorcees and accepts those in remarriages into its folds?
But wait, there's more......The entire point of Jesus' life on Earth was the Crucifixion on the Cross for our sins. Yet, the rite Jesus himself introduced at the Last Supper, Protestants largely ignore or celebrate once a month. Hardly any Protestant churches have an altar and even of those who do, they don't have communion on a regular basis. Jesus said, do this as a memorial to me, which to get technical, means something more like "in perpetuity" yet, the very thing that starts the passion of our Lord, the Last Supper, is missing from Protestant worship. Jesus didn't read the Bible to his disciples. Jesus didn't write a single line of the Bible. Jesus did institute the sacrament of Communion at the Last Supper. So you tell me, which is greater: The Bible or the Last Supper? So who really follows Jesus, one who reads the Bible or one who celebrates the Last Supper?
The Canon of the Bible wasn't set until 400 AD when St. Jerome finished the Vulgate.
It's the RCC that gave us the Bible.
Regarding saints, the very first creeds of the Church talked about the Communion of Saints, and that communion has always been 1) The Church Militant composed of the living on Earth. 2) The Church suffering in Purgatory and 3) The Church Triumphant in Heaven, that is, the saints of heaven. The Communion of Saints is a community first and foremost and all members of the community of saints can help each other but the Church Triumphant doesn't need help and the Church suffering has already had their judgement which means the people who needs help are the living - the Church Militant. That is why we pray to saints. The various situations they faced in life and/or the various causes the Catholic Church has deemed for them to be linked to, make them intercessors for our petitions.
It is natural for us to use intercessors in our normal daily life on Earth. We do it all the time. We may appeal to a family member to help out with problem or with a mutual friend in some sort of need. The communion of saints is basically the same thing but on the supernatural plain. If there's one thing we know about God's creation is that it is complex and God could do everything just by fiat and frankly, in one instant if God so wished, but he doesn't. He takes time and uses many mediated causes. One of those mediated causes can be Saints.
Also, there's nothing in the Bible that directly says the Trinity either. Moreover, there's nowhere in the Bible that it says the Bible is the ultimate authority and sole authority regarding Christianity. You'd think if the Christian Bible was to be like the Koran, that is, the absolute literal word of God and sole and only necessary authority, the Bible would say it like the Koran does. The Bible doesn't say that though. Far from it. When we read the NT letters, what we find is that there's a structure to the early Church with leaders and leaders on top of those leaders and ultimately, there is Peter. Peter makes the decision via a dream that the Jewish dietary laws can be abrogated even when all the other Apostles believe Christians have to follow Judaic dietary laws. (Paul wasn't Judas Iscariot's replacement. Mathias was.) The structure and the hierarchy of the RCC predated the canon of the Bible. In fact, we see the structure in ACTS when the Apostles meet to address the dietary laws.
You certainly know a lot about Catholicism or you have good copypasta.
Son of a gun, I typed out a huge message and accidentally refreshed.
Anyways, I used to be a member of the Catholic church. I took communion. It's so very obvious that most Catholics are extremely ignorant of the Bible. Tell me, why are so many Catholics liberals? I've met SO MANY Catholics that believe abortion is not murder. If you go to a non-denominational Church 99% of the people there will be based. I have yet to see any good answer from any Catholic "father" give a good excuse for the ideological fallacies in the Catholic Church.
The Bible is NOT a Catholic book. This is just another attempt to exalt the church as an authority in addition to the Bible. If the Bible is a Catholic book, why does it nowhere mention the Catholic Church? Why is there no mention of a pope, a cardinal, an archbishop, a parish priest, a nun, or a member of any other Catholic order? If the Bible is a Catholic book, why is auricular confession, indulgences, prayers to the saints, adoration of Mary, veneration of relics and images, and many other rites and ceremonies of the Catholic Church, left out of it? If the Bible is a Catholic book, how can Catholics account for the passage, "A bishop then, must be blameless, married but once, reserved, prudent, of good conduct, hospitable, a teacher...He should rule well his own household, keeping his children under control and perfectly respectful. For if a man cannot rule his own household, how is he to take care of the church of God?" (1 Tim. 3:2, 4-5). The Catholic Church does not allow a bishop to marry, while the Bible says "he must be married." Furthermore, if the Bible is a Catholic book, why did they write the Bible as it is, and feel the necessity of putting footnotes at the bottom of the page in effort to keep their subject from believing what is in the text?
If the Bible is a Catholic book..
"It is natural for us to use intercessors in our normal daily life on Earth. We do it all the time. We may appeal to a family member to help out with problem or with a mutual friend in some sort of need. The communion of saints is basically the same thing but on the supernatural plain. If there's one thing we know about God's creation is that it is complex and God could do everything just by fiat and frankly, in one instant if God so wished, but he doesn't. He takes time and uses many mediated causes. One of those mediated causes can be Saints."
The difference is THOSE people are alive. Please show me where in the Bible where it instructs you to pray to anybody but God. The practice of praying to saints is based on the doctrine of intercession by saints, taught by the Catholic Church.
The Bible is clear that Mary’s unique position as the mother of Jesus did not give her any more access to God than another believer in Christ is given. Therefore, Mary is not worthy of receiving prayers from Christians. Jesus addressed this in Luke 11 by emphasizing that it’s more blessed to be a follower of Christ than to be the mother of Christ.
It is worth noting that praying to the saints is rooted on praying for the dead. Most pagan religions believe that when a person dies, the living should pray for his/her departed soul. During the syncretism of paganism and Christianity many centuries ago, this doctrine insidiously crept in the church.
Since pagans were already praying to their deities and it was hard to turn them to true worship, the adulterous church willingly compromised their beliefs to accommodate new converts. Pagans can still pray to dead people and their gods and goddesses but with a Christianized version. For example, instead of praying to the pagan mother goddess, the false church directed that they should pray to Mary, the mother of Jesus instead. They still pray to their gods and goddesses, but with a different name.
Dead people can’t pray to God anymore. They don’t even have any knowledge of the affairs of men. The Bible tells us:
“For the living know that they will die; BUT THE DEAD KNOW NOTHING, And they have no more reward, For the memory of them is forgotten” (Ecclesiastes 9:5).
OUR FOCUS OF WORSHIP AND PRAYER SHOULD CENTER TO GOD and not to any dead saint.
The reason so many Catholics are liberals is because for the better part of the 20th century, around 80-90% of Catholics voted for Democrats. There were political machines throughout the east coast and the midwest that specialized in taking Italian, Irish and other Catholic immigrants right off the boat and turning them into Democrat voters. However, Roe V Wade SCOTUS decision changed that. So since 1973, Catholics have been split right down the middle. Some parishes are very liberal and some are very conservative. Unfortunately, our Catholic Bishops in the U.S. have been overwhelmingly deferential and supportive of the Democrat Party. A great many Catholics are angry about this. One of the things that is fueling the exodus out of mainline Catholic Churches to the Confraternity of St.Peter and the PPSX Catholic Churches (as well as the boom in the Eastern Orthodox Churches) has been conservative and Republican Catholics leaving mainline Catholicism.
I'll be the first to admit that Catholics do not know their faith and catechesis has been a woeful failure for about fifty years now. However, Catholics that are educated in their faith tend to know the Bible well and read it, as reading the Bible for a half hour is considered a good work and in some cases, a plenary indulgence is attached to it. btw, to pretend that it's just Catholics that are ignorant of the Bible or that all protestant faiths somehow are educating their children in Christianity is not warranted. The reality is, the average Catholic knows more about the Bible than the average Protestant Christian today. Look around.....Catholics are still attending a weekly church service in greater percentages and proportions than any Protestant denomination. In fact, the mainline Protestant denominations that made up the bulk of Christianity in America a century ago, are battling for their very continued existence. The Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians combined do not even have a million regular Church goers among them. So church going Catholics might be ignorant of the Bible but the percentage that are still going to Church vs protestants that stopped going to church decades ago is the actual comparison.
I'm not going to answer each objective you have because you can do your own homework.
I will suffice it to say this, once again, the canon of the Bible wasn't set until 400 AD. It was the RCC that gave us the Bible. There are bishops, "cardinals", nuns etc in the Bible but they don't go by those names. They go by names ecclesiastic, presbyter, deaconess etc.
Also, you seem to want to dismiss what Catholics believed, thought and did in the first centuries of Christianity as somehow "not Christian" because it doesn't fit your interpretation of what is and isn't in the Bible. Yet, it was these Catholics that gave us the Bible and formed the first Churches and spread the word throughout the Eastern and Western Roman Empire and beyond. For the record, the first time the word Catholic is used to describe the Church is by St.Ignatius of Antioch in Greece in the first century. Catholic tradition holds that it was this St. Ignatius that Jesus took as a young boy on the Sermon at the Mount saying, to enter the kingdom of God, one most be like this small child.
Anyway, the Bible isn't the only inspired writing from the first an second century. The reason why the Bible contains what it does is because it is part of public revelation meant for all humans in all places at all times. As opposed to private revelation or inspired literature that deals more with the internal workings of the Church, the interior lives of saints or the development of deposit of faith by theologians, saints and the learned. The Catholic Church holds that all public revelation ended with the Death of St. John and any Catholic writing that wasn't directly tied to someone who knew Jesus during his lifetime wouldn't be included.
I suggest these books to understand the early Church: The Didache which is the writing of the first five popes after Peter starting with Pope Linus. Adverses Heresis by St. Iraneaus. Iraneaus was a disciple of St.John along with St.Polycarp. Of course, there's always St. Augustine's Confessions, City of God, On Predestination and on the Perseverence of Saints.
Now, let me throw some bible thumping at you since you decided to do that to me: Which one of your protestant denominations instructs small children not to call their fathers, dad? Which one of you have plucked out an eye or cut off a hand because it was part of sin? Especially in the days of internet porn, are we to believe that no protestant's right hand has sinned? Then there are the passages about Jesus coming with a sword to set mother against daughter and son against father...I don't see many Protestants murdering their families over religious disputes. Jesus told Peter to "get behind me, Satan" does that mean Jesus thinks Peter is the devil or does that mean when the devil entered Judas Iscariot it was a just figure of speech? Maybe your interpretations aren't as rock solid as you think they are. Who decided what these things meant in practice? Who formed the rites and liturgies in accordance with God's will? It wasn't Protestants because Protestants didn't exist for the first 1500 years of the Church.
Furthermore, all gospels condemn divorce and remarriage. Every single one of them and even goes further and says that any one of you that marries a divorced woman, commits adultery. Jesus very clearly said that Moses only allowed divorce/remarriage because of the hardness of heart of the people. Now, tell me, which protestant denomination refuses to marry divorcees and accepts those in remarriages into its folds?
But wait, there's more......The entire point of Jesus' life on Earth was the Crucifixion on the Cross for our sins. Yet, the rite Jesus himself introduced at the Last Supper, Protestants largely ignore or celebrate once a month. Hardly any Protestant churches have an altar and even of those who do, they don't have communion on a regular basis. Jesus said, do this as a memorial to me, which to get technical, means something more like "in perpetuity" yet, the very thing that starts the passion of our Lord, the Last Supper, is missing from Protestant worship. Jesus didn't read the Bible to his disciples. Jesus didn't write a single line of the Bible. Jesus did institute the sacrament of Communion at the Last Supper. So you tell me, which is greater: The Bible or the Last Supper? So who really follows Jesus, one who reads the Bible or one who celebrates the Last Supper?