Different answer, but I want to say why I became a Catholic. I was raised as Eastern Orthodox, but when I moved to a Catholic-majority environment, I really really liked Catholicism. It was Greko-Catholicism, so there wasn’t a huge difference, but the way church treats people fascinated me.
This may sound so simple, but because I wasn’t really a religious person, those were the first things I noticed. Firstly, in Eastern Orthodox churches all the priests were always always collecting money for ‘‘new churches’’, and somehow all the priests were riding last model of BMWs. IN E.Orthodox, there were no seats, and even elderly (most of the people coming for the liturgy are elderly) had to stand for hours. Did I mention there was no AC or anything, and the weather can get very hot. All this is rooted in the teachings of Orthodox Christianity, especially Eastern - the more miserable you are, the more good you are in the eyes of God. A very simplified explanation, but still. Eastern Rite Catholic Churches were sooo different. They were very important in the community. The charity was on peak, the priests were young and active. When I first walked in and asked where can I buy a candle, everyone stared at me and pointed where the candles were. People could just leave donations, but in E.Orthodox, there was literally a cashier in the church. I was tired of this church that I can hardly even call a church now, more like a business institution. I explored other confessions of Christianity, like Protestantism, and they didn’t really correspond to my beliefs.
In the beginning everyone was Catholic. Rome’s version of Catholicism kept changing things. Each major change resulted in schism, Catholics leaving the “new version.”
There’s the version before Mary was called Mother of God. There’s a version that didn’t accept the apocrypha. Pre Trent. There’s a version that was more Traditional, pre Vatican II. You can break it up into many more segments.
The original Catholic church is found in the pages of the New Testament, and its nothing like today’s Roman Catholic Version.
For example, the Pope now says gays are ok. But the apostle Paul doesn’t agree:
Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, (1Co 6:9 NKJ)
If Paul said what the Pope said, he would have been excommunicated.
No, it isn’t. If you accept the timeline of evolution, billions of years…Christ and the apostles become fallible human beings, because they all accept Genesis as literal truth.
If Christ is nothing more than a man, He isn’t compatible with Christianity.
Maybe in the sense of ‘One two, skip a few, ninety nine, one hundred.’ It’s that gap that negates their claim. They are a 20th century creation claiming to be the original because they think they are emulating what the first Christians did, without the benefit of tradition, documentation, and a real understanding of those Christians and what they did. Laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic.
I doubt they are even aware how the “Mother of God” argument was being used against Church/Apostolic teaching. People of that time were insisting Jesus could not be divine…because, if he were, then Mary, a human would be the mother of God. Hence, Jesus could not be divine. Are today’s Southern Baptists part of first century groups who believed Jesus was not divine?