There is a difference between ‘need’ and ‘choice’. God does not ‘need’ to do anything. Until they understand that you’ll be arguing in semantic circles.
Ask them if they want to know why the Catholic faith teaches that God ‘chose’ to send His Son.
And be prepared to go into concepts like ‘sin’. Since most people today don’t seem to have any idea that anything that ‘they’ do could possibly be enough to keep them out of the heaven that they deserve, being the great people they are, this is another probable sticking point.
I wish you luck because you will need it. . .not because you are wrong in defending Catholicism (you are perfectly right), but because so many have become blinded by materialism and indifferentism and modernism. Even 100 years ago the average Christian knew that while man’s inherent nature was not evil, because of concupiscence he was prone to fall into evil unless he actively sought to do good. But today, the average Christian not only thinks man’s inherent nature is positively good (and certainly more tolerant than the old-fashioned ‘God’ with all His tiresome rules, though that has mercifully been ‘reintroduced’ to many modern Christians as ‘God-is-love-and-wants-you-to-be-happy’), he thinks that he himself, Mr. or Ms. Average, is pretty much perfect. Never mind that he or she almost never goes to church (why bother when God is ‘everywhere’?), never opens a Bible or reads spiritual works (those things are so violent/sexist), never actually does anything for others (hey, the other day when I saw a poor person I wrote a nasty letter to the editor about how Catholic Churches were full of gold and jewels while people were starving. What more can I do?), may speak to God (usually through demands or self-praise) but never listens. . .
Just so you know, I’m like those people too, far more often than I should be, sometimes more than I want to be. It’s so easy in this “I’m OK-You’re OK” society to think that as long as we aren’t doing whatever **society ** has chosen to call a wrong, that we are okay people. And society will also call us every name in the book, from bigot to crazy to pharisee to murderer, if we ‘ignore’ society’s judgment in favor of God’s judgment. It is pretty hard to stand firm when it seems as though not only the people you don’t know, but the people you do know and love, do this.
But trust in God, and like Pope John Paul II, take “Be Not Afraid” as your shield, and God bless.
