My response: In all of your explanation there is no evidence or rational reason given for your change. Your answer is like saying "I became a scientologist because I didn’t want to hurt Tom Cruz’s or Kirstie Alley’s feelings. It has nothing to do with common sense, reason or evidence.
Erm… he said that what MOVED him to RCIA was an initially emotional concern, but by the end of the program he fully believed the truth presented to him.
Perhaps you’re not familiar with Catholicism, but we don’t do “altar calls” and that’s it. To become a fully initiated Catholic one must proceed through RCIA: a 6-12 month course which meets for several hours weekly to discuss the what and the why of Catholic belief. We do this precisely because we want people to believe rationally: because we believe that God, the universe, and faith are all rational positions.
I used to be a fundamental Baptist.
Nobody’s perfect.
… and I’m SO going to get in trouble for joking about that! (and I meant it SOLELY as a joke!)
You know why I changed? So many things didn’t make sense:
Well, no offense, but you came from a non-liturgical church group that relies on immediate conversion as a basis of foundation of faith… something that was only an invention in the last 400 years or so. It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of things didn’t make sense, because when you divorce the church from two of the foundational pillars upon which she rests (Sacred Tradition and Magisterial Authority), you lose a lot of the sense of the faith.
That God would send a heathen to hell because some missionary hadn’t yet reached him with the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ?
Again, excusable that you aren’t aware of the idea of invincible ignorance, but the Catholic church does not teach that said heathen would be necessarily damned. If such a heathen were to be improperly catechized (or not catechized at all), truly moral, and worshipped devoutly according to his beliefs, then they would be considered to be invincibly ignorant.
Now, we don’t KNOW that the invincibly ignorant are ALL going to be saved, but we can say that we have HOPE for their salvation because God is just, merciful, and loving.
That people who lived thousands of years before Jesus was born would be damned forever in a lake fire because they were born at the wrong time?
This is one of those aspects that can only cause confusion by divorcing Christianity from tradition and it’s Jewish roots.
Let’s be clear: the Jews believe that the dead go to a place of rest (Sheol), where they await the coming of the messiah. Christians hold that Christ was that messiah, and that after His death, he descended into Sheol to minister to the dead, where they were offered the choice to accept or reject Him. That’s a key catholic doctrine: that all who came before Christ were justly dealt with and had their opportunity to accept or reject salvation. It’s even built into the apostles’ creed…
And that God would torment people for all eternity for the political crime of not believing in Jesus?
God withdraws from people who reject Him, giving them the ultimate power and freedom to reject even their own creator. If that WASN’T a doctrine, we’d have atheists complaining about a tyrranical God who forced Himself on everyone with no regard for free will… it’s a lose-lose situation, sometimes, but ultimately God deemed it best that we be free to love and accept what we choose… even if that means the painful decision to let those who reject God go.
That Catholics would go to hell because they didn’t accept Jesus as “their personal savior”?
Fortunately, again, this is something that Catholics don’t believe…
At some point in my life I resolved that no matter how painful it was (and it was!) I would incline toward what was most likely to be true. I did, and now I wonder why others don’t as well.
Possiblement because they don’t view the evidence and come to the same conclusion as you… and it’s interesting to me that you didn’t spend some time researching other churches and faiths… after all, my belief that there is SOME God, undefined, is the precursor to my belief that the God preached by the Catholic church is that true God. Just because something the Catholic church says MIGHT someday wreck my faith that the Catholic church preaches truth, I would still be possessed of that belief that SOME God exists, and would review that belief in light of the teachings of other denominations or faiths to see if any of them rang true.
You decided that the fundamentalist baptists weren’t preaching a true doctrine about God, and immediately lept to the conclusion that no God exists… THAT is an emotional response if there ever was one… in that you denied the entirety of theistic belief because ONE of the two aspects was challenged. To wit, theistic belief holds that there is a God, and that God can be known. You determined that the baptist route was not a way to know God, and used THAT as your evidence to deny the first premise… which is not exactly the logical methodology to use (though perhaps you were never catechized on the rational proofs for the existance of a God… so without the theistic concept of God holding water, you fell farther than you should have since you never had the rational foundation of theism in the first place…)
Now let me ask: Did you ever consider being rational instead of being led by your emotions?
Again, I’ll highlight that RCIA is a 6-12 month course in which a person is exposed to the rational argument for Catholic beliefs. Far from jumping into an emotional frenzy of conversion, we REQUIRE that converts take their time and know their faith before they become catholic because we DON’T want anyone joining without knowing what it is they are pledging when they recite the creeds of the faith.
Conversely, to jump from “the Baptists have the wrong idea about God” to the position that “there is no God” is an exact example of a decision that lacks rational support.
), but RCIA and the amazing clergy in our parish pushed me over the edge. By the time my confirmation arrived, I was joining because I knew the Catholic Church contained the fullness of the truth and I wanted it for myself.