Posted on 05/24/2004 9:17:25 PM PDT by churchillbuff
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) -- As president of the Christian Coalition of Alabama, John Giles is no stranger to a pew. Yet he remembers well the time he got lost in a Roman Catholic church.
"I couldn't even follow the order of service, it was so foreign to me," Giles says of that day some six years ago.
Since then he's found his way and a new home in the Roman Catholic church — a home that might seem foreign to the overwhelmingly Protestant church population of Alabama.
"I have to admit to you that the whole time that I was in that church service, I was reduced to tears, and I couldn't explain it," Giles said Monday in an interview with The Associated Press.
"In fact," he jokes, "you would have thought I had been spending the whole weekend down at the House of the Rising Sun down in New Orleans, that I had all this sin in my life that I had to get out."
In any case, Giles and his wife, Deborah, were received into the Catholic Church at St. Peter's Parish in Montgomery on Easter Sunday.
Such a decision normally wouldn't be a matter of public interest, but Giles says he anticipated the questions that have followed his conversion from the Protestant faith.
"It would be nice if my private, Christian walk could be my private, Christian walk, but it's very difficult in my job for that to be the case," he says.
Giles says he knew the questions would come because as a Protestant he, too, had mistaken notions about Catholics. And the most frequent question he gets from his friends is "why?"
With that in mind he wrote an eight-page letter explaining his reasoning. In it, he explains that he had attended a variety of Protestant churches in Montgomery, including Christian Life Church and River of Life Church.
But once he visited the Roman Catholic church, he found himself in awe of its history and ritual, particularly its use of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in each service.
Trips to Israel and Rome spurred his curiosity. And the deeper he looked into the faith — which is the largest in the United States but lags behind Southern Baptists and other Protestant denominations in the South — the more he says he realized that many of his beliefs about Catholicism had been wrong.
"There is a perception among Protestants — you kind of have this perception that if you're Episcopal or Catholic, you're not even saved, you're not born again, which is totally a myth," he says.
He recalls one example from the New Year's holiday, which he spent in Florida with the chairman of his board. He had told the chairman of his and Deborah's plans to convert, and he says they were well-received.
"But we went to some other friends of theirs' house on one of the nights we were down there," Giles remembers. "And so we're sitting around visiting and this one lady was teaching a Sunday School class on cults. And she began to name off all the cults that she'd be teaching and named Catholic in there."
He acknowledges that the reaction by his Protestant constituents may be mixed.
"We didn't make this change to win friends and influence people and do it from a popularity standpoint, because we knew that in the state of Alabama, this is probably not a popular position to take in the Christian movement," he says. "So it remains to be seen."
But he hopes they, like he and his wife, will keep an open mind.
"We hope that we could have a small contribution to building bridges where there weren't bridges," he says. "Because Christians are Christians. There's no such thing as Christians and Catholics."
Yep, you seem to be it. All I see you doing is running about lobbing hand grenades with no foundation other than your inward apparent need to be vile and personally insulting. Love ya anyway. Thanks for bumping the thread :)
Bumping the thread is precisely what I'm doing here. Your every word discredits you, and I want as many folks to see that as possible.
Don't you have anything better to do than troll Christian threads and badger Christians? We kind of frown on that around here.
I don't know any Klansmen. Do you?
Whether you realize it or not, your irrational misconception and hatred of the Catholic Church are consistent with the beliefs of the Ku Klux Klan.
OK, wiseguy. I make no qualms about being a Roman Catholic. In fact I wear it on my sleeve in defiance of attacks from ignorami like you.
Now, who do you stand with? State your affiliations. Do you have the guts to answer honestly?
Where is the story of God telling anyone how he designed stars that produce specific gasses? Either you believe the scriptures as God's word, or you don't. It isn't necessary that Moses should have recieved it at Sinai. But it is possible. He was gone for a good while as I remember from the story. We have to deal with what is there. When we run off speculating and turning speculation into doctrine, dogma or whatever you want to call it, that's when we stop being Christians and start being religionists following philosophies that "seem" right to us. That's where you get sects calling themselves Christian; but too wise in their own philosophies to know anymore what Christianity is. That's how you get groups openly putting people living in sin behind the pulpits and doctrinalizing murder as being "not against the holy spirit" so long as your sect disagrees with the person being murdered. That's how you get groups that read from nonexistant Gold plates a nonexistant language that translates single Characters into whole paragraphs or chapters into a book that is blasphemous, yet, somehow labeled as "Christian" ...
It's fun to discuss possibilities to be sure. But that's where, I'm afraid, some things are best left to be answered by God as God will no doubt answer these issues if they even matter anymore in the next life.
People seem to forget in all their speculations that God *said* "let their be light* and it became so. If God can do such a thing as that, it presents no issue that such a being could take a handful of 24 hour cycles by our reconning out of an immeasurable eternity and speak our whole universe into existance just for something to do.
Where exactly in the Torah is this promise from the Torah fulfilled?
12:3 I will bless those who bless you, and he who curses you, I will curse. All the families of the earth will be blessed through you.'
Va'avarechah mevarachecha umekalelecha a'or venivrechu vecha kol mishpechot ha'adamah.
That is a good point, and I appreciate it. I will of course take exception to applying its use in the case cited - "the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven" - to all parables.
For example, the parable of the prodigal son: here Jesus states his point before the parable and uses the parable to illustrate the point more fully.
The parable here is not to obscure, but to clarify and illustrate.
Metaphors, of course, are used for the same purpose.
Still, your point in using a parable to communicate mysteries to those who can hear, while obscuring it from others is valid; there are two communications uses, and I retract "bizarro world" - and have regained my speech.
thank you.
Well, number one, I don't have any misconceptions of the Catholic Church. Two, I "hate" no one. Three, you're still engaging in false accusation and pretending you have some basis for it that you've neither specifically proffered nor proven. Four, I've never made my religious affiliation any secret. I'm Christian - independant pentecostal type bible believing Christian who largely attended indepenant pentecostal churches, and assemblies of God, though I've been through Baptist, friends, weslynn, etc at one point or another when I was younger.
But, if you wanted to know that, you could have asked before or read it on another thread. Your point was an attack and libel me in order to detract from what I say. I'm used to such tactics. It's still sin. Will still be sin the next time you and your collegues do it. But it won't stop you then any more than it stopped you this time. It has to matter to you before it will cause you to bite your tongue.
As I noted to you previously, your actions speak louder than words.
Beyond that, you are the one attacking. You might want to stop projecting and clean up your act - maybe even repent and ask forgiveness for slandering me - not from me, from God. Just a thought. Not because it's the Christian thing to do. I'm not expecting you to act like a Christian. But, Catholicism teaches that at least bearing false witness is a sin, so one would hope you could own up to Catholic belief even if you can't hold up to Christian belief..
Just so I'm understanding you.
You aren't saying we should limit our knowledge to what is in scripture, right? I mean science, history, philosophy, mathematics, geography, archeology, geometry.. you're not proposing that we do not explore those areas of knowledge past what is in scripture.
Right?
Read the post. Maybe one has no real recollection. In the same way that one may not recall posting garbled words and saying that hte Pope was worshipping Mary. In the same way that one could post propaganda and then defend it even when it's shown to be a lie. Well, the author of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion sure has his own disciples.
Thank you D. And you're welcome, sir. I dont' quite follow your exception as gaining anything from a parable normally means you have some idea of the secondary point being driven home. Parables are purposed doubletalk. They aren't a lie or
a deception. They merely fog the intented meaning if you don't understand the principles being addressed in the first place. Thus, the meaning is given to those whom it is intended for. Others attempt to grasp carnally for meaning and do so to their own great folly.
Jesus could easily have told the priests "kill me and I will rise again in 3 days". But to do so would have revealed God's plan to the Devil and as Paul noted, Satan never would have seen to Christ's Death on the Cross. So he instead wrapped it in metaphor - destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days. He let their minds run away with them so that he spoke the truth; but, their inability and unwillingness to understand combined with their hatred for him led them to misinterpret what he said and accuse him with the misintrerpretation. Something that goes on yet today.. pretty constantly actually..
Anyway, good to see something of the old D again - the one I remember first meeting. I gotta get some sleep. Up way past my old fart bedtime. lol.
But for every true and cogent post you make, he launches five bilious, lie-filled diatribes. So what good does it do?
And that, acording to him doesn't seem to be Christ. I as a Christian take umbrage to that!
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