You may not realize this, but your use of colors and varied fonts for emphasis make it difficult to reply to your posts: remember that the only thing someone responding to you sees in the ‘reply’ box is the code, and it’s really hard to read when all your words are surrounded by
****’ type coding on either side. I know that using all that stuff is fun, and you CAN, of course, use it, (else why would the option be available?) It’s still difficult to read in the response window.
*Not to mention that I am irresistably reminded of all those black and red ink pamphlets filled with line drawings and printed on fuzzy paper that the anti (insert belief system) types slip under windshields in the church parking lots. *
*As to your comment that I am 'displaying an abject ignorance of church history…" that’s rather a nasty ad hominem, don’t you think? Would you care to tell me, why I, as a Mormon, should depend upon Catholic church history to inform MY doctrines, when the entire basis for the existance of the LDS church is the claim that y’all went haring off down the wrong trail very early on? *
The point here, as you have so cogently written, is that you are using a double standard. I understand that you do not believe as we do, when the basis for our beliefs are extrabiblical. I’m not the one insisting that you believe that Jesus appeared to ancient Americans, or that
you believe that all of us (including Jesus, Lucifer, all the 'fallen angels and you and me) are literally the children of God and thus, in at least one sense, siblings. I’ve never demanded that. As you write, here, you don’t accept the basis for those beliefs as being valid.
Yet you are demanding that I accept, as being valid for me your claims about Mary because YOUR tradition …traditions that we don’t accept as divine revelation and that, by the way, we actually claim to be apostate…says so.
I think that’s a bit of a double standard, don’t you?
So, while you can use your arguments to convince those who share confidence in the correctness of Holy Tradition, you have to use something else with those of us who do not. In my case, if you want to show me why
I must believe something, you are stuck with using only those things that both of us consider to be valid sources.
Like…writings previous to the time Catholics declare that public revelation stopped.
In the meantime, I won’t insist that you believe that 'Jesus and Lucifer are brothers," or that Jesus visited the ancient Americas, using BOM verses as prooftexts. Fair enough?
**First of all – I am not “insisting” that you believe ANYTHING **about Mary – as seen through the eyes of the Church. I was shooting down the false doctrine of Sola Scriptura that usually rears it’s ugly, albeit, non-existent head when speaking about Marian doctrines.
I never demanded that you believe in Mary’s perpetual virginity. I was pointing out that you
cannot prove from Scripture -
or history and tradition that she had other children. The fact is that more can be presented to prove the opposite is true. As I stated above, those who are using Sola Scriptura
On many of these threads – I have challenged ANYBODY to show me a tradition or historical reference that showed Mary had other children. No such tradition exists.
People are more than willing to accept many historical “truths” that are based in legend before they accept any extra-biblical evidence about Mary. They will accept – without question – that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree or tossed a coin across the Potomac without
any historical evidence whatsoever.
What I also resent is the fact that all denominations that claim to be Christian have piggy-backed on Catholic beliefs for as many centuries as they could. They then created aberrant, pseudo-Christian doctrines* (like Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide)* that had no basis in the historic Christian faith – all-the-while claiming that it is the Catholic Church that is wrong. We are the ones who wrote, compiled and declared doctrine the very books of the Bible that they adhere so vehemently to.
**You claim the very basis for your church is the fact that we went so far down the wrong trail very early on – yet you can present **nothing to buttress this claim.
I have more respect for pagan religions that make things up out of thin air than those who would claim to represent the truth of Jesus, while
perverting those very truths.
Finally – I want to thank you for proving me right by disapproving of my use of color. I have pointed out the fact – on MANY posts that people usually resort to this attack when they have run out of “proofs” for their positions . . . **
, so it is really, really hard for a lot of us, when a Mormon says s/he "won’t accept as an authoritative source of Christian doctrine anything written much past the end of the first century", because you do so all the time.