Obviously, I feel the exact same way about you.
This doesn’t have a thing to do with feelings, much less how anyone feels about anyone else personally, so I don’t know why you even mention it. I don’t “feel” any way about you particularly; I don’t even know you. Observing that someone debates poorly isn’t any more personal that observing that he has a bad golf swing. Common sense would tell you that if there are a large number of reasonable people who aren’t convinced that either there is room for reasonable disagreement or that your argument is fallacious, just like the ball not going in the right direction would tell you that something is wrong with your swing. Now if you want to keep hooking and slicing, go ahead, but I just don’t see the point in doing anything if you aren’t going to attempt to improve your skills.
But that’s what discussion forums are for my friend.
Given the number of sorry arguments that grace the Internet, you might be right!
But the reason that I personally get involved in discussions is to identify bad arguments so that people don’t have to waste time with them anymore. I usually only hit Protestant arguments in Catholic-Protestant discussions, not because Catholics don’t make bad arguments, but because it tends to derail threads into a mass of confusion in my experience.
Still, there are a couple of terrible Catholic arguments that I wish would go away. The whole “you need an infallible interpreter,” “you need an infallible definition of the canon,” and “there are 30,000 Protestant denominations” strategies are poorly constructed, and they don’t really get to the underlying differences between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Why don’t you give it a shot?
Because I don’t really see what the point of such an exchange would be. We would have to go through a massive amount of Scripture, and there is no sense in doing that before we separate the wheat from the chaff in the arguments. And speaking of which, here are two great examples of classic chaff (in addition to the one jpusateri noted):
men gain eternal life on the basis of their good works which are produced by their cooperation with grace.
Protestants, following Scripture, say that it is grace alone that saves us. Not grace producing merit in us. Grace alone. The cross of Christ by itself saves us by faith.
The use of “their” in first argument implied that the cooperation someone comes from the person cooperating, but the canons of the Councils of Orange and Trent make clear that even the cooperation itself is from God’s grace. It is God working with God, not God working with man if man lets Him. The latter argument is simply self-contradictory. You say “grace alone” but then say “by faith.” That makes faith an instrument of justification. You can, of course, say that faith is the alone instrument of justification (as Protestants do), and you can say that the righteousness is alien (i.e., it doesn’t produce merit in us), but you can’t logically claim that “grace producing faith” is
grace alone but “grace producing merit” is not.
Sola gratia doesn’t mean that grace cannot have an instrument; otherwise, Protestantism would be equally defective. Both sides accept
sola gratia; the dispute between Protestants and Catholics with whether faith is the alone instrument of justification.
