Look at the responses to those of us who read the Word of God, and base our faith on whether something lines up with it. We’re told we worship a book, while they follow the words of men alone. They act like we were reading some pagan book.
And the bible makes it clear they looked to scripture daily. Most of us would be ashamed of ourselves if we compared our time in the scripture to theirs.
Man’s natural inclination isn’t really to better himself. Man’s natural inclination is to pride. That is what cause to original fall of man. What they want is an easy way to get in, that still lets them thump their chest at earning it.
But remember that not all Catholics are that way, and many Protestants are just as big a chest thumping.
A preacher once said that the reason God wants salvation to be purely a gift is that God wouldn’t be able to stand eternity with people boasting of what they’d ‘earned’
Could you blame Him for that? It would be like listening to some amateur drummer for eternity. I’d go nuts.
I couldn’t agree more.
and here I thought you were the one who said not to distort the words of others. No one said to follow the words of men, alone or otherwise.