Whore of Babylon Blog Roundup

I guess if we're too busy, other bloggers will pick up the slack for us. Before I get started on real post, I thought I'd link to some other reactions on the web.

Postscripts From the Catholic Spitfire Grill has a very comprehensive rebuttal here:

Over and over I hear Ephesians 2:8-9 quoted to me as if the thought stopped right there. In fact, verse 9 does not complete the paragraph. Verse 10 does. And although I memorized Ephesian 2:8-9 as a Protestant and quoted it to my share of Catholics in my day my children have memorized a little bit more....because more Sacred Scripture is always better than less don't you know?. Ephesians 2:8-9 AND 10 "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast. For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them."

The Catholic Church teaches ALL of Ephesians. That we are saved by the work of Christ, and then He works through us. We have no merit. But we better darn well do something with the Grace that Christ gives us or we become like the Dead Sea, with living water flowing in but dead because nothing flows out.

Joy at Coffee With Candy writes:

If you research it, you will find that:
1. The Catholic church is charged in ancient times for causing the fall of Rome...How? The charge made by angry pagans said that the Church wiped out all pagan worship thereby causing Rome to collapse. (Read about it in Augustine's The City of God.)
2. Why would the Church then purposely adopt pagan practices?
3. Very little is known about Dagon, but what is known is that ancient Bishop's mitres resembled smallish caps. They did not arrive at the now familiar shape until the 1500s. Therefore, the Church did not "copy" the alleged headgear that Dagon was wearing (unless you are willing to say that the Church waited 1500 years to do so).
4. The pictures Candy posted which "compare" Dagon's headgear to a bishop's are for the most part recent artistic renderings. Certain features have been "enhanced" to help make the "point".
5. It is common for a leader to have a "big hat". There is nothing pagan or wrong with that. It is merely custom. That is really the only similarity between Dagon's headgear and that of a Bishop's.

Speaking of Dagon, Take The Long Way Home wrote about him a while back:

Here’s the main problem with researching Dagon. There’s just not much out there! Not much is known. I couldn’t find anything, nothing at all, that described the worship of Dagon. The reason for this is that his worship died out so long ago. The very latest dates I could find for anyone worshiping Dagon was in 402 AD (and this is only if you buy the idea that the Greeks were worshiping Dagon as Marnas. And did you notice who sent the worshipers of Marnas packing? It was the Christians who destroyed the last vestiges of Marnas worship. It’s hard for me to believe they destroyed the temple, then incorporated the religion into Christianity, without any historical evidence to back it up!). Most of his followers were gone by the advent of Jesus!

Sooooo. Essentially, what I learned was, nobody (at least nobody in the historical world) knows much about Dagon. Historians can’t even decide what he was the god of, much less how he was depicted. Depending on which city you lived in, you probably worshiped him differently. His religion died out in the BC years for the most part, although it’s possible there were a few hangers on as late as 402 AD. But the mitre doesn’t appear until the mid 10^th century. And then there’s the problem that the mitre itself has gone through many stages, most of which don’t look anything like the representation that the anti Catholics claim to be identical to the fish head of Dagon’s priests. And then there is the fact that an entire sect of Catholicism (the Eastern Rite Catholics) don’t wear the Western style mitre to this day. So to believe what the anti Catholics have to say you have to believe that Western Christians resurrected a long dead religion (one that they themselves helped to stamp out the last vestiges of) sometime in the 15^th century (that’s when the mitre most closely resembles the one today). This would be after the Protestant Reformation, by the way. Who would believe this???

A Soldier's Wife credits Candy with starting her on her way to conversion . . . TO Catholicism!

I've read this blog off and on for some time and I owe the author a loving thanks :)

Because of some of her posts like this very one, it helped encourage (along with other things that I've talked about previously) me to follow what the Lord was saying to me and now I very happily have my toe in the Tiber and am so at peace with my decision to fully trust the Lord with this and all chapters of my life, and not insist that I need to run the show :)