"A simple statement of fact"
This is your reality and your religion. Try not to be too smug, I might happen to show up in your Heaven.
“This is your reality”
There is only one reality.
“and your religion.”
The religion doesn’t belong to me; I belong to the religion. I choose that because all rational evidence shows that it is the religion that has the fullness of Revelation, and all supernatural evidence confirms that.
“Try not to be too smug”
First I was trying to hurt you; now I’m smug. As Jerry Lee Lewis might have sung were he an academic instead of a redneck, “Whole Lot of Projectin’ Goin’ On.”
“I might happen to show up in your Heaven.”
No man knows what the future might bring. For all I know, you might become a saint. Right now, though, you have chosen to believe a bunch of things that aren’t true, and you’re in danger.
“You know nothing about me”
You have chosen to tell us all a good deal about your stance on God, some of it intentionally, some of it unintentionally. We all do it. From the time of our first posts, we can no longer say, “You know nothing about me.”
“and yet you think I am turning my back on the collective wisdom of two thousand years.”
That’s not something anyone “thinks.” You declared it.
“Each of us has our own path to take in this life.”
Nonsense. There are only a few categories of person; we all fit into one or the other.
“If my path takes me around the Church instead of inside of it, it is of my own choosing.”
And if it takes you to Hell, that is also of your own choosing.
“It makes me no less of good person than say, a faithful Catholic is.”
That’s not the question. It makes you less of a good person than *you* would be if *you* were a faithful Catholic, and makes it much harder (post-Vat II) or impossible (pre-Vat II) for *you* to get into heaven.
You’re turning this into a contest, making the assumption that everyone is comparing himself to you and finding himself better than you. Quite the contrary, a faithful Catholic would pray, in the words of Cardinal Merry del Val, “That others become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should, Jesus grant me the grace to desire it.”