Well, I WAS a Catholic when I joined this site. I’m not sure what I am now, because it seems like some of the Church’s dogma isn’t drawn from the Bible, at least not entirely. Anyway, the post someone made above the one above this one seems to make good sense to me, and as long as they get the legal benefits a married couple gets, that’s fine by me.
I’ll download that mp3 and listen to it later. And no, I’m not trying to “goad” anyone. I’m just trying to figure out the real source behind some of the Church’s beliefs and tell which ones are human-made and therefore not as…important? I don’t know.
EDIT: the link points to a site without anything called “One Church.”
Jesus left nothing in writing. The oldest Christian texts we have are the Epistles of Paul, written more than a generation after the Crucifixion. When Paul wrote, he did not know he was writing the Bible.
For some 350 years, the authoratitive teaching of the Church was the oral tradition handed down from generation to generation.
Over time a huge number of Christian texts appeared – some traceablle to the Apostles, some to the Apoistolic Fathers, and some outright forgeries. The idea of a new Christian bible emerged only slowly, in the Fourth Century. and when it did, there was little agreement what should go in that Bible. The decision as to what should be in the Bible and what should not be was based how it conformed with the oral tradition.
So the New Testament is based on the Sacred Tradition of the Church – which existed for centuries before the New Testament was formed.
If a Protestant tells you, “My religion is based on the Bible,” he’s right – someone read the Bible, came up with a new interpretation, and built his religion around it – more than a thousand years after the canon of the Bible was proclaimed by the Catholic Church.
But if a Catholic tells you, “My religion is based on the Bible,” he’s wrong. The Catholic Church is based on the preaching of the Apostles and the New Testament is based on the Sacred Tradition of the Church. And as Saint John tells us at the close of his Gospel, there was a great deal not written down, but preached orally from generation to generation.