That's the problem with putting people up on pedestals.
Nor do non-Catholics Christians teach that their pastors have the power to determine their eternal fate.
Catholics are raised believing that the priest has the power to retain their sins or not, thus giving the priest ultimate power over one's eternal destiny.
These men are perceived to have this special in with God because they are highly trained in religious matters and are extra holy.
THAT is an awful intimidating factor and so when the priest says *Jump*, you don't even ask *How high?*, you just start jumping.
So people are told to ask a priest cause I guess the Catholic religion doesn't think people are smart enough to think for themselves.
Catholics are raised believing that the priest has the power to retain their sins or not, thus giving the priest ultimate power over one's eternal destiny.
These men are perceived to have this special in with God because they are highly trained in religious matters and are extra holy.
THAT is an awful intimidating factor and so when the priest says *Jump*, you don't even ask *How high?*, you just start jumping.
One problem: most of the things Protestants associate with Roman Catholicism are common to all the ancient historical churches that existed and continue to exist in the original chrstian heartland and the original chrstian ethnic groups.
There are at present four ancient historical liturgical traditions. Catholicism (both Roman and Eastern) are only one of those four. The other three are Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and Nestorianism. Every one of these ancient churches has a priesthood, the sacraments, "the holy sacrifice," bishops who are venerated, rituals, rites, ceremonials, and of course good works, since every one of them pre-existed the Reformation invention known as penal substitution.
I'm sorry, but monks did not suddenly appear from nowhere in the mountains of Ethiopia in 313 because of Constantine. All the ancient manuscripts are products of these ancient communities and are written in their languages.
The Armenian Church became a state church in 301, seventeen years before chrstianity was so much as legalized in the Roman Empire (it didn't become the official Roman state religion till much later in the fourth century). The Armenian Church is not Protestant.
There were already monks and nuns long before Constantine. The pre-Constantinian Egyptians started monasticism. The Egyptians were also praying to Mary in the third century (before Constantine).
The apostle Thomas is supposed to have founded the chrstian community in southwestern India in the year 52. Guess what? When they were discovered by the rest of the world in the fifteenth century they had sacraments, priests, rituals, commandments, "the holy sacrifice"--the whole schmeer. There are Protestants among them now, but only because they were planted there after the Reformation.
Listen, I grew up believing the "Constantine founded baptized heathenism" thing too, but history simply does not bear this out. There is absolutely no record of their being anything even remotely similar to a Protestant church in the ancient, pre-Constantinian world. I'm sorry. It's not there. The only reason so many people believe it is because they are convinced the "new testament" was meant to contain absolutely everything one would ever need to know--a blatant and unexamined assumption. It is thus held for purely dogmatic reasons, and although I hope everyone understands that I respect dogmas and dogmatism, this is simply a dogma that began in the sixteenth century.
Still, both Catholics and Protestants like to pretend it's either one of them or the other.
Every single one of the ancient churches--Copts, Syrians, Ethiopians, Georgians, Armenians, Ethiopians, Indians--has a web presence and may be studied online.
I know everyone gets tired of me saying these things, but, believe it or not, it's because I love Fundamentalist Protestants and hate to see them wear themselves out in a vain cause while the rest of the world laughs at them (simply for believing things they all used to believe). But no one will understand this unless it is G-d's mysterious Will.
So people are told to ask a priest cause I guess the Catholic religion doesn't think people are smart enough to think for themselves.
That's funny. I thought Catholics were all geniuses (do you ever get tired of hearing the boasting about how intellectual and rational they are?), so much so that J*sus had to, in his mercy, provide Fundamentalist Protestant churches for poor anti-intellectual schnooks who weren't smart enough to match wits with an illiterate Guatemalan peasant.