Great Bishop of Geneva! A Point About Certain Protestant Fundamentalists · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Some People Really Can't Relate to a Catholic Convert
now [4:42] here's something interesting every group [4:45] I left said my stretching was [4:47] backsliding every group I came to said [4:50] my stretching was growth
Stan Mitchell on the David Moses Perez show, on the video:
Those Who Think They Haven't Deconstructed Their Faith Actually Have Also | Stan Mitchell
David Moses Perez | Iconoclast Podcast | 16 May 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWaZVoF-UEo
I can state with perfect confidence, that kind of narrowness was never the point of my Fundamentalism, even back when I was a child unbaptised of Evangelical convictions. I was YEC, am still. I believed the Devil seduced Adam through Eve, in the shape or with the manipulation of a snake, do still. I believed people get possessed and that Jesus drove demons out, do still.
I was allergic to suggestions that Mormons, 7DA, Catholics would not make it to Heaven. Part of my dissatisfaction with Luther came, later on, finding that he actually believed Catholics (he had been one) were going to Hell for Catholic positions.
The Catholic doctrine I have had the hardest time with is probably Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus.
While converting, I could say to still Lutheran friends and acquaintances, they'd be better off, better assured of salvation if converting. I didn't tell them "if you don't convert, you are going to Hell" ... the closest I came to saying such a thing back in Sweden was telling an ex-employer who tried his best (or worst) at being a mentor for me, "if a non-Catholic is neither excused by ignorance, nor by stupidity, and remains non-Catholic, he's going for Hell, I can't guarantee you belong to the exceptions" ...
Anyone who imagines he can do any kind of combat against Fundamentalism in me by showing "that non-Catholic is a decent fellow"(1) or "that non-Fundie seems to be decently Catholic" (2) is wasting his time, if he expects me to change my mind. He's also wasting my time if he puts all my projects into a shoe box as long as I don't change my mind. Certain kinds of administration against certain kinds of clientele could have that power, and if that's the case, I resent it.
Those who would totally endorse my Fundamentalism, if it were instead on the Evangelical / Unitarian / Jewish / Muslim side, and not the Catholic one, equally. If they want to be a sparring partner, fine. If they want to be a mentor, it makes me puke.
In fact, anyone who finds it problematic, either that I am Catholic or that I am Fundie, that should remain his problem. I resent if he tries to make it mine.
But there is a real point, faith is faith if it is itself, there are limits outside which it is no longer so. I'm (usually) far more generous about what the limits could be for a particular person (except when he has endorsed an obvious impiety)(3), than about what they are in dogma and in doctrines that could be usefully erected into dogma.
The people who are combatting my Fundamentalism (yes, they exist), like those combatting my Catholicism (yes, they also exist), may imagine they are doing me some kind of favour. For instance if I were convinced everyone except myself or other adherents of Pope Michael II were going to Hell, and it caused me anguish over people I genuinely liked. They are not doing me that favour. That kind of narrowness never was my point. But once they start trying to impose that favour, they also cease to be people I genuinely like.
Equally, some might pretend that:
- I'm homosexual
- my Christianity causes me to reject my homosexuality
- I entertain myself with forlorn hopes about homosexual men being able to decide to marry a woman anyway, but somehow never seem to make it
- so, the best thing possible for me would be to make me ditch the Fundamentalist reading of Bible or Church Tradition saying sodomy is mortal sin, and accept myself as homosexual.
The reality is very different:
- I am heterosexual
- I am bullied by people who find some excuse to consider me homosexual
- I don't change what they would consider as criteria between homosexuality and heterosexuality (4)
- and I don't get a wife because girls don't like to put themselves in the way of bullies and partly because some of them have believed the liars.
Everyone who participates in an intrigue to remake my faith so I can accept myself as homosexual is in reality participating in this bullying. And the one person who's unlikely to get saved from sin and Hell as long as they continue is myself. Plus whoever of them is not a complete idiot having the excuse of folly before God's eyes. Given their tactics, that's at least some.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Pius X
3.IX.2024
(1) Erik Manning would be an example. So would Ken Ham.
(2) Trent Horn and Jimmy Akin are both examples, except when speaking on (i e against) YEC.
(3) I called John Bergsma and Scott Hahn out for their view on Genesis 9, after writing a refutation of an identical view here:
Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Bad Theology Pushed, Good Theology Rejected (Noah's Drunkenness)
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2024/08/bad-theology-pushed-good-theology.html
(4) To some anti-Catholics, confessing to priests, or believing one should do so, praying the rosary, or believing one should do so, fasting or abstaining on Fridays or believing one should do so, saving oneself for marriage could come off as "effeminate" ... to some Conservatives basically Neo-Stalinist, believing young teens can marry and young marriages shouldn't be stamped as pedophilia "proves" I am really a pedophile and according to their version of Freudian analysis, that means I am homosexual. To some machists, chosing writing as a trade or composing music of the Mozart type rather than of the rock type exposes me as a faggot. This can probably be more potent with Russians (who recall Chaikovsky) than with Germans (who recall Johann Sebastian Bach. To some machists and anti-Catholics, any clothing outside the most generically masculine contemporary is, on a male, cross dressing, whether it's a Dominican's habit or my capuche, my mente or my breeches.
