[betty boop]

I'd say you are corrrect on the first part but no on the second...

If you condemn the first part — the vine to something like 60 million Catholics in the United States alone, who would be the branches; then by logic how good can any of those branches be? Let alone the quality of the fruit they bear?

How do you spare the latter, if you condemn the former?

[Running On Empty]

Again, thank you. You analogy is both brief (thank you) and insightful.

You have expressed concisely in only 50+ words exactly what I have been thinking for some time, as I have watched the “wholesale” (favorite word of one poster) condemnation of the Catholic faith and then not wanting it to be perceived as a personal attack that affects the individual. At which point, I have observed, that any response from individuals is disingenuously labeled as “whining” or obfuscation.

In line with your post, I understand a recent post made by tax-chick:

“Every plural-pronoun group is made up of individuals about whose belief we can legitimately claim to know very little”

[Quix]

I have not directly ever observed any purportedly Christian organization

to have been even 98% or more evil

or

even 98% or more purely holy.

As I’ve noted before . . .

satan uses the bad in all of us as individuals

and

the bad collected together into organizations

against us as individuals; as groups and as part of the Body of Christ.

He’s very good at that.
He’s very good at hiding that.
He’s very good at white-washing that.
he’s very good at getting that to be seen by parts of organizations and individuals as wonderful and sometimes, even holy—witness the pharisees 2000 years ago.

[Quix]

JUSTIFYING THE EVIL BECAUSE OF THE GOOD

IS A FOOL’S ERRAND.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for sharing your concerns and insights, dearest sister in Christ!

Your objections are significant to me because you are on the front lines engaging atheists, particularly the anti-Christs, just about every day. I'm confident that you love God surpassingly above all else. You don't let the atheists get a pass.

However, complaints about remarks directed at religious authorities by persons who all the while ignore similar or worse remarks directed at God Himself, ring hollow to me.

After all, regardless of how one perceives his religious authority's place in the metaphor of the vine, the Father is the husbandman and Jesus is the vine.

I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.

Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every [branch] that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.

Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.

I am the vine, ye [are] the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. - John 15:1-5

I wonder how much of a difference it would make if all the effort that went into arguments among the people who agree on Who God IS were instead spent on the front lines, witnessing to the ones who don't know or don't care and refuting the ones who hate God or want to remove His Name throughout our country?

God's Name is I AM.