The proper response to entirely true "accusations"?

[DarkLight]

This is one thing I’ve really been having difficulty with in evangelization. How do you deal with the people for whom some practice is just obviously false. So an example might be, “Catholics pray to dead people like the pagans do!” or “Catholics hold to practices that aren’t in the Bible!”, where the person seems to think that simply affirming this, to them obviously unChristian, practice, is proof enough that Catholicism is false. It’s to them like saying I’m a Christian but I believe in Mohammed.

What I’ve been having trouble with is figuring out how to get people to back up and get away from thinking that these beliefs are just obviously unchristian.

 

[Mintaka]

If you can get people to laugh, sometimes that helps. (If they are people with a sense of humor.) Like if it’s “practices that aren’t in the Bible,” you can say something about how they’re not in the Bible, so “microphones and electric lights have to go!” Or something completely silly, like a toy.

(Don’t say this kind of thing to people who are Amish or related groups, obviously…)

Going straight to Jesus might be a good thing on the dead people. Jesus said that God is the God of Abraham and Jacob, and that He’s not the God of the dead, but of the living. So obviously Abraham and Jacob aren’t dead – and neither are any of the rest of the holy people who have died. They are alive in Christ.

 

[robwar]

This is one thing I’ve really been having difficulty with in evangelization. How do you deal with the people for whom some practice is just obviously false. So an example might be, “Catholics pray to dead people like the pagans do!” or “Catholics hold to practices that aren’t in the Bible!”, where the person seems to think that simply affirming this, to them obviously unChristian, practice, is proof enough that Catholicism is false. It’s to them like saying I’m a Christian but I believe in Mohammed.

What I’ve been having trouble with is figuring out how to get people to back up and get away from thinking that these beliefs are just obviously unchristian.

There isn’t much you can do if the people you are talking to have been exposed to this kind of anti-Catholic stuff. Like the one poster said, you can use humor to show how nutty their ideas are. You can also say “really, what proof do you have for that, would you like to hear the truth …” The best thing is to view what you are doing as planting seeds which you may never see the fruit from. If they go on an anti-Catholic rant, then step back, shake the dust off your feet, move on and pray for them.