Then you should hang out with a better class of men, lest you become like them.
It was my husband who led me back to my faith and to the reformed perspective of Christianity, as is his Godly responsibility. I thank God for him every day.
In your post you assume the OPC keeps membership records but you deny that Rome does. lol. Rome cannot count correctly. We've been told on these many threads by Roman Catholics that "once a RC, always a RC." Rome does not remove the names of baptized members from its membership rolls.
If it did, that "1.2 billion" would deflate fast.
There are baptized Catholics and practicing Catholics, the latter being a subset of the former. The parishes keep registers, people are removed from and added to the registers all the time. Parishes report numbers to the diocese and the dioceses usually contribute reports to the national episcopal conferences.
People change parishes frequently, sometimes they don't bother to inform the office of the parish they leave. Usually the parish will purge people from the active roster annually. Nobody wants to have inflated numbers because that will seriously impact the reports on per capita contributions. Also, if parish A has 20k people on the rolls and only 3k communicants that's going to look horrible. No parish priest is going to risk the wrath of his bishop just so he can join in the Catholic conspiracy to numerically dominate the world.
I said I have KNOWN such men, not that I hang out with them. Are you trying to be omniscient now?
It was my husband who led me back to my faith and to the reformed perspective of Christianity, as is his Godly responsibility. I thank God for him every day.
Perhaps he did, what I asked is how you could know for a certainty what is in his heart.
In your post you assume the OPC keeps membership records but you deny that Rome does. lol. Rome cannot count correctly. We've been told on these many threads by Roman Catholics that "once a RC, always a RC." Rome does not remove the names of baptized members from its membership rolls.
If it did, that "1.2 billion" would deflate fast.
You still have not addressed the FACT that ALL agencies that determine demographics agree on the number of Catholics and NONE of them are suggesting that they are simply going by what the Catholic Church claims.
It would be incredibly irresponsible for statistical agencies to simply accept the claims of the Catholic Church without verifying them, it's too many people and a false premise would throw off too many other statistics. For instance, let's say the Catholic Church was wrong about the 1.2 billion and it was only 600 million, that would mean that there are only 1.5 billion or so Christians in the world (since it is the 1.2 billion Catholics ADDED to the other Christians that result in the total of 2.1 billion Christians), then there would be a question about the beliefs of the other 600 million people.
Nevertheless, the FACT remains that you have yet to cite any credible group that has verifiable statistics showing that the number of Catholics is overstated.