You are wrong but one thing I must commend you for is at least you care enough to debate. At least you have not taken the indifferentist “I’m okay, you’re okay” position common to so many today. You realize that the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church cannot be at the same time the one true Church. (This by the way is what led Jim Likoudis to study Catholicism- he realized that both the Orthodox and the Catholic Church claim to be the true Church, and they cannot both be the one true church at the same time)
In other words I commend you for accepting the law of non-contradiction:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_contradiction
When I’m flat out told that I’m wrong in no uncertain terms, then there’s not a whole lot of room for the debate you commend me for caring about.
I’d like to clarify one thing though. While I do believe that the Orthodox Church is the original Church as established by the Apostles and the 72 followers, and is the original Church from which all other denominations branched away, including Roman Catholicism, I don’t think that a persons eternal soul is necessarily in immediate peril for practicing another denomination. However, the road to salvation is a lot harder and fraught with more peril the further away from the Orthodox Church one strays. I’ll use fasting as an example:
The reason we fast is to gain control over our sinful ways by denying our bodies pleasures that can lead to passions; to focus our spiritual awareness so that we may be more receptive to God’s will, and to remind us of the suffering of Christ during his 40 day fast.
For RC’s, the practice of fasting usually means the exclusion of meat only. In America, RC’s only fast for about one week (plus or minus a day or two) out of the year during Lent, and then just on Fridays, with the addition of Ash Wednesday. Fasting doesn’t even necessarily apply to what you eat… it has actually been suggested by Catholic clergy that abstaining from text messaging or TV should be an appropriate way to fast.
To the Orthodox on the other hand, fasting is given its due consideration much more seriously. The normal rule is to exclude all animal products (meat and dairy), as well as oil and wine, from the diet. Orthodox Christians, if they can, will fast every Wednesday and Friday of every week of the entire year. I addition to those days, there is Holy Week (7 days), the Lenten Fast (40 days), the Nativity Fast (40 days), the Apostles Fast after Pentacost (variable, usually 2 - 3 weeks), and the Dormition Fast (2 weeks) in anticipation of the Theotokos feast. This adds up to about half of the year spent fasting. As for other Protestant denominations, I really don’t know, except that Methodists and Baptists of the bible belt in East Texas would consider the suggestion of fasting a really funny joke.
My point is, the Orthodox Church is the only Christian church that I’m aware of which tries to practice strict fasting in accordance with the spirit in which it is meant to be undertaken. In my opinion, Roman Catholics slack with their fasting. They don’t fast enough, and when they do fast, they don’t do it right. The way the RCC has slowly eased off of the rules for fasting throughout its history is just one symptom of a much larger problem - that problem being the slow movement of the RCC away from and out of communion with the Orthodox Church over the centuries.
There are other issues that I won’t go into because I’m tired and this is already a long post, but suffice it to say that a practicing Roman Catholic is going to find his or herself more temped by sin and more likely to fall away from salvation than a practicing Orthodox Christian.
