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Maybe you missed that I am a convert to Catholicism. I was not taught Catholic doctrine by anybody like a parent or a cleric. I did my own studying. My teachers, in fact, were rather anti-Catholic.

But, just as you have misconstrued what I said and initiated the attack a little before you could say with precision what my position was, so also their arguments and, especially, their allegations about Catholic faith, thought, and practice proved to be unreliable.

When their behavior also started going off the rails, my inclination to jump ship was even stronger. And when the Episcopal Church showed itself to be utterly incoherent, I swam the Tiber. And subsequent ill-informed attacks by non-Catholics cement my allegiance.

Consequently:

but since your’e taught purgatory REALLY, REALLY exists, well, then, lack of Scriptural evidence will never matter.

just shows an eagerness to reason beyond one's data.

May I conclude,though, that you agree with Aristotle that an object in motion tends to slow down (since that's what we see) and that you disagree with Newton and Einstein because, while they explain observations, one never actually observes what they say?

When YOU guys are confronted with an apparent contradiction in Scripture, you have to adopt some kind of rational hermeneutical principles to fight your way through the thicket. Your principles do not in arise in a vacuum. You do not come to the Bible (or rarely come to it) without a hermeneutic provided by somebody else.

Even the JW's had an Adventist background, and look at the shipwreck their pretense of coming to the Bible without any other influences is!

And, leaving aside the witness of Maccabees, there are those niggling little verses, which non-Catholics generally blow off or acknowledge with a shrug. Our account has room for them. So I think we're pretty Scriptural, FAR more Scriptural than our antagonists say. More coherent too. (Though I personally claim little coherence.)