Lots of people believe in the Easter bunny, too. That's a tradition.
The Bible is quite clear about Mary and Joseph having sex and other children. I don't care what some guys who died a long time ago thought. They could have just made it up and passed it off as being true and here are millions of people believing something on their say so that is not even alluded to in the Bible.
There is ZERO Scriptural support for any of it. I don't care who they claimed to be or who the Catholic says they are, if they're contradicting written Scripture that the church fathers canonized as the infallible word of God, they're wrong.
There's no reason in the world to pass off this nonsense about the immaculate conception of Mary and her perpetual virginity. It plays no role in Christ's work of redemption on the cross. It's extraneous stuff that just gets people's eyes off Christ and God.
Jesus says....(John 14:6) Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
Putting anything in the mix besides that is idolatry.
If the Protestants want to worship the book the Bishops of the Church compiled, then fine. Have at it. Knock your socks off. I often find your interpretations of scripture to be quite amusing. Just do not ever... EVER call yourselves Christians. A true Christian does NOT place the words of St. Paul on the same level, nor (as seen disgustingly way too often here place) do true Christians place the words of St. Paul OVER those of Christ.
This 'Sola Scriptura' nonsense Protestants like trot out over and over and over again on these forums is about as anti-Christian as it gets. You CANNOT reduce Christ to a few chapters in some "magic perfect book" and then call yourselves Christians. I find that obscene.
Go ahead and worship that book the Church compiled long after Christ founded his Church on earth. Just don't pretend the Bible came before Christianity. Treating each part of the Bible as important as the Gospels is about as anti-Christian as someone can get. Bible worshipers or folks that treat the Bible as 'perfect' are about as Christian as Muslims are. (By the way... PLEASE at least get the chronology of Christianity right. It's not that complicated. First came Christ. Then came the Apostles and their succession, and THEN MUCH LATER CAME THE BIBLE!!!!
This really shouldn't be that hard to understand - Christ chose 12 guys to follow him around so he could teach them what they need to teach the rest of us. Christ DID NOT hire a scribe, or wait until the printing press was invented before he showed up on Earth. Christ brilliantly chose men that could teach things that words alone cannot do. The written word is a horrible way of teaching. Hands on face to face transference of knowledge IS NOT. Yet the Protestants love to worship a BOOK!! That's just silly. It's nice to have a book to accompany someone in their quest to be an apprentice of Christ, but if I want to TRULY learn what it is that Christ wants from us, I'm going listen to the folks he taught, and not rely solely on the acoompanying "manual" for my education.
Believing the Bible is the inerrant 'word' of God is about ridiculous as believing in the Easter Bunny.
Indeed it is, a secular (well actually an Anglo Saxon pagan)"small t" tradition.
"The Bible is quite clear about Mary and Joseph having sex and other children."
M, no one, until a generation or two after the Reformers, believed that. That's just an historical fact. As I have said before, maybe the Holy Spirit went off for a nap for the first 1500 years after Pentecost, but I doubt it. Maybe, maybe the the Evil One has misled a rebellious people, the protestants, into heresy after you rejected all of what your Holy Mother Church was teaching instead of simply and appropriately "reforming" those areas where Rome had strayed from the Faith.
"They could have just made it up and passed it off as being true and here are millions of people believing something on their say so that is not even alluded to in the Bible."
The bishops who put the NT together for you could have lied to you too, M.
"There's no reason in the world to pass off this nonsense about the immaculate conception of Mary and her perpetual virginity."
M, do you know what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is? Do you know that the Reformers believed in the Blessed Mother's perpetual virginity? Why do you suppose that the Holy Spirit abandoned His Church for lets say 1600+ years on that subject? BTW, the Immaculate Conception was dogmatized by the Latins in the 1840s, for reasons which escape me but were apparently sufficient for Pope Pius IX. We Orthodox consider it an "innovation", just like the filioque you recite when you pray the Creed. That's not "in the bible" either. Its origins are Spanish (6th century) as a reaction to Arianism. The ONLY reason any protestant prays the Creed with the filioque is because the Roman Catholic Church, your Holy Mother Church, taught it to you that way!