Christ is the Lord : The Raving Theist

This is good news to start out the new year. The Raving Atheist has become the Raving Theist! In fact he has converted all the way to the Catholic Church. You can send your good wishes to:Christ is the Lord : The Raving Theist

Welcome home!







Please browse my eBay items!
Visit my new Amazon Store!

catholics and scriptures

As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. Proverbs 26:11

It's painfully obvious that Candy Brauer of keepingthehome.com has hit the end of her data base when it comes to slams against the Catholic church. She doesn't know what the Catholic Church teaches and so she has to just keep re-running the same old attacks, while ignoring the rebuttals.   See Kelly's rebuttal to her latest below.

Of course, the Catholic church encourages scripture reading from its members, but Candy will never tell you that. But here's what the catechism actually says!:

1437 Reading Sacred Scripture, praying the Liturgy of the Hours and the Our Father - every sincere act of worship or devotion revives the spirit of conversion and repentance within us and contributes to the forgiveness of our sins.

2653 The Church "forcefully and specially exhorts all the Christian faithful . . . to learn 'the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ' (Phil 3:8) by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures. . . . Let them remember, however, that prayer should accompany the reading of Sacred Scripture, so that a dialogue takes place between God and man. For 'we speak to him when we pray; we listen to him when we read the divine oracles."'


133 The Church "forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful. . . to learn the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ, by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures. Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.

Charles Chiniquy: Fifty Years In the Church of Rome

Another Candy repost. Read our rebuttal here.

Not Newsworthy

Often Candy, or someone in our comments, will post a link to a news article about some scandalous comment that the Pope has allegedly made. You know, aliens don't need Jesus, or the Pope is throwing Darwin a birthday bash. We are then supposed to explain this terrible breach of Christian doctrine, which is usually no more than sloppy reporting. Headlines sell papers, folks.

While this article is difficult to excerpt down, I thought it would greatly illustrate the point that just because you read something in the paper, doesn't mean it is true. Here the actual "controversial" remarks of the Pope are contrasted with ten newspaper headlines from around the world. When you read what he actually said and compare it with the headlines, it will leave you scratching your head in confusion.

From Apoloblogology, Shock! Pope Benedict Misrepresented By Media.

Keep the Mass in ChristMas

This is the time of year where Candy and many blogs which share her niche start on the great Christmas debate. You know, are we celebrating a pagan holiday, should we keep the tree, or toss "X-mess."

I found this article written by an atheist to be very thought provoking. Yes, he makes the dreaded "conservative Protestants" mistake, so skip it if that will upset you. There are conservative non-Catholics who observe Advent and Lent, and conservative non-Catholics who feel that Christmas and Easter are pagan and don't celebrate them at all. Regardless of that, I feel he makes a good point that without the liturgical year, the celebration of Christmas loses its context.

Conservative Christians complain about secularists, atheists, and liberals trying to undermine Christmas, but there is little historical understanding and awareness in these complaints. An examination of Christian history indicates that religion has been slowly stripped from Christmas, as well as other Christian holidays, over a long time now — and by Christians themselves, primarily the conservative Protestants who are today complaining the loudest. . .

The religious holidays of November and December were designed to help Christians contemplate death and judgment; this, in turn, was supposed to help prepare Christians for the Christmas season when they were supposed to contemplate Jesus, salvation, and heaven. Traditionally, the Christmas “season” actually lasted through February 2nd, when Christians celebrated the Feast of the Presentation at the Temple and the Purification of the Virgin.

Gift giving occurred throughout January, but most intensely during the “12 days of Christmas,” which were the days between Christ’s Mass and the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. Yes, it all happened after Christmas day. Today, celebrations of Christmas occur before or on the actual day; afterward, the season is over except for the New Year celebrations which are devoid of any Christian meaning or tradition.

Once the religious elements were stripped from November and December generally, thus taking away practically the entire liturgical calendar, killing the religious elements of Christmas day was the logical conclusion. Protestants helped here as well by eliminating mass on this date.

A Christmas Message from the Pope

VATICAN CITY, 17 DEC 2008 (VIS) - Benedict XVI dedicated the last general audience of 2008, celebrated in the Paul VI audience hall, to Christmas, "a universal festivity".

"Even non-believers", he said, " perceive something extraordinary and transcendental, something intimate that touches our hearts in this yearly Christian event. It is the festivity that sings of the gift of life. The birth of a child should always be a joyful occurrence".

"Christmas is the encounter with a new-born baby, wailing in a wretched grotto", the Holy Father added. "Contemplating Him in this crèche how can we not think of all the children who still today, in many regions of the world, are born amidst such poverty? How can we not think of those newborns who have been rejected, not welcomed, those who do not survive because of a lack of care and attention? How can we not think of the families who desire the joy of a child and do not have this hope fulfilled?"

"Unfortunately, under the drive of a hedonist consumerism, Christmas runs the risk of losing its spiritual meaning, reduced to a mere commercial occasion to buy and exchange gifts. Actually, however, the difficulties, uncertainty, and the economic crisis that many families are living in these months, and which affects all humanity, can truly serve as a stimulus for rediscovering the warmth of the simplicity, friendship, and solidarity that are the typical values of Christmas. Stripped of its materialist and consumerist trappings, Christmas can become the opportunity to welcome, as a personal gift, the message of hope that emanates from the mystery of Christ's birth".

"Nevertheless, all of this does not suffice to capture the value of this celebration we are preparing for in all its fullness. We know that it celebrates the central event of history: the Incarnation of the Divine Word for the redemption of humanity. ... 'Thus the recurring annual cycle of the mystery of our salvation is renewed that, promised at the beginning and given to the end of time, is destined to last without end'".

"At Christmas, therefore, we do not limit ourselves to commemorating the birth of a great person. We do not celebrate, simply and in the abstract, the mystery of the birth of humanity or, in general, the mystery of life. ... At Christmas we recall something that is quite concrete and important for human beings, something essential to the Christian faith, a truth that St. John summarizes in these few words: 'The Word became flesh': This is a historical fact that St. Luke the evangelist is careful to place in a particular historical context: during the days of the decree of the first census of Caesar Augustus".

"In the darkness of the night in Bethlehem a great light was lit: the Creator of the universe became flesh, indissolubly and eternally joining himself to human nature, to the point of being 'God from God, light from light' and at the same time truly human. By 'the Word' ... John also intends the 'Meaning'" and "the 'Meaning' that became flesh is not just a general idea inherent in the world; it is a Word addressed to us".

"The Meaning has power: it is God. A good God who cannot be confused with some being on high and far away who cannot be reached, but God who made Himself our neighbor and who is very near to us", "God reveals Himself to us as a poor 'infant' in order to conquer our pride. ... He made Himself small in order to free us from the human delusion of grandeur that arises from pride; He freely became flesh so that we might be truly free, free to love Him".

"Christmas", the Pope concluded, "is the privileged opportunity to contemplate the meaning and value of our existence. The nearness of this solemnity helps us to reflect, on the one hand, on the dramatic nature of a history in which human beings, wounded by sin, are perennially seeking happiness and a reason for living and dying; on the other hand, it exhorts us to contemplate the merciful goodness of God, who has come to meet humanity that He might communicate the saving Truth to us directly and make us to participate in His friendship and His life".

Catholic Fire: Catholic Carnival 203: Waiting in Joyful Hope

Catholic Fire: Catholic Carnival 203: Waiting in Joyful Hope

Head Covering

Candy has reposted her article on head covering. Here is our previous article on the Catholic view of head covering.

What I found most interesting was from one of her comments. Candy justifies her lack of conviction on head covering by saying:

Meanwhile, if it is a sin to not cover, then I am innocent from that sin, because I don't know it's a sin to not cover, therefore, as the Good Book says - it will not be imputed to me as sin.

Couldn't Catholics be innocent from idolatry, cannibalism, and other sins she has mentioned for the same reason? Yet where Catholics are concerned, Candy has written repeatedly that "sincerity will not save you."

No Apologies - the eucharist

TheLove to Be Catholic.com site has a lot of education videos. You can check them out at:
Love To Be Catholic - Catholic Videos

We all know how much Candy LOVES to use inflammatory youtube videos on her blog, so perhaps she would be interested in some of our videos. These aren't quite the "in your face" type that Candy prefers. In fact the narrator is a rather mild mannered Catholic priest. If anything he could use a little more pizazz in his presentation. Yet I think his humility and the truth of his message shines through, and that's something that is always missing in the videos presented over at Candy Brauer's keepingthehome.com.










Please browse my eBay items!
Visit my new Amazon Store!

Gary Sinise- Catholic Convert!

I'm not going to waste a lot of time during Advent, as we prepare for the birth of Jesus Christ, talking about Candy's fascination with Vampires and the Catholic Church. And frankly, if she puts up a big post about it now I am seriously going to wonder about her own dedication to preparing her family spiritually for Christmas!

Instead, I'd like to share a nice story going around St. Blog's about actor Gary Sinise's conversion to Catholicism. You know him as Lieutenant Dan in Forest Gump and from Apollo 13.

The Intersection: A MIGHTY WIND "Gary Sinise"







Please browse my eBay items!
Visit my new Amazon Store!

Vain Repetition

One of Candy's favorite accusations against the Catholic Church is that we are guilty of "vain repetition" through prayers such as the rosary. We have discussed the topic here on our blog, and I see that Barbara Curtis is having that discussion on her blog currently, in case anyone would like to join the discussion.

See, talking about differences can be helpful in understanding each other. Making declarations and not allowing a response is not.

Real Life Rosary Weblog: The Catholic Carnival 202

We have an article entered in this week's Carnival from Visits to Candyland. So check out how us idolaters really live and practice our faith!! LOL!
Real Life Rosary Weblog: The Catholic Carnival 202







Please browse my eBay items!
Visit my new Amazon Store!

Jehovah's Witnesses

Ah...Candy is branching off in other directions.

I know very little about the Jehovah's Witnesses.  I remember Professor Scott Hahn saying that if you are ever going to debate or discuss with one, you should make sure you don't  use their bible because the translations are very different. I know that they go door to door.

However, I know enough about Candy and her misrepresentations and lies about Catholicism enough to know that she probably doesn't know that much about the JWs either and that undoubtedly most of that information is probably wrong too. 

If someone wants to know about what Jehovah's Witnesses believe, go to a Jehovah's Witness web site!  It's really that simple.

Candy on end times and other stuff

First of all, kudos to Candy Brauer at www.keepingthehome for changing her blog motif to Advent purple!  Very seasonal, very liturgical and quite unexpected! Maybe lurking on our Catholic site is starting to rub off on her!

I often wonder what newbies think when they click on a link to Keeping the Home and then have to read about the Rapture?

Anyway Candy's newest is Keeping The Home: The Rapture. I don't think most people actually read everything she writes, (and also since she keeps removing stuff I think it is important to not only link to her posts, but also to copy and paste the important parts) so here is a sample of some of her most outrageous stuff. (Bolded emphasis mine)

This is a famine more serious than that of the lack of food and water, for this famine is of the Word of God. The word of God has been slowly being replaced through the years with counterfeit translations. I'm speaking about new version Bibles that are being translated by homosexuals, lesbians, occultists, witches, new agers, and other such people claiming that they are Bible scholars. Many of these translators have already received some judgment from God for their translation deceptions. Some of these so-called "scholars" have lost their voices for no apparent medical reason, for example. Some of the scholars thought they were doing a good thing, and have learned of their error, and have repented and turned to God, and now speak out against these counterfeit translations.

Back in Genesis 3:15, we find the first prophecy of Jesus Christ. Satan also heard that prophecy, and he understood it. He tried to counterfeit that prophecy, via Nimrod. In secular ancient history, we learn the name of Nimrod's wife: Semiramis. The Bible calls her Ashtoreth, Astarte, etc. She is also known as Ishtar, Easter, Diana, and many other names that you can learn from a well-read Wiccan. Meanwhile, Nimrod became known as Moloch, etc. Nimrod died, and Semiramis came up pregnant, claiming that she had not lain with a man. This child of Semiramis became known as Baal.

Even this very day, one can easily track down shrines to this "virgin" Semiramis and "savior" son Baal. You'll find her and her son under various different names, such as:

- Shing Moo
- Devaki and Crishna
- Diana
- Isis and Horus
- Aphrodite (The Mediatrix)
- Venus and Jupiter
- Ashtoreth and Baal
- The Queen of Heaven

I dare say that some religions worship Semiramis and Baal under the names Mary and Jesus. You can tell the false Mary and Jesus from the real ones, via the way the people worship them. Are they bowing down to statues and figurines of Mary and Jesus? Are these people praying to Mary as the "mediatrix," instead of to God, in Jesus' name?

"For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;" 1 Timothy 2:5

Many people will fall into religions that worship the counterfeit Mary and Jesus. They will fall into these cults because of their ignorance of the Word of God, or because they are reading the new Bible versions that have been translated from extremely errant manuscripts translated by ignorant or ungodly people.

You see, just as Satan tried to create his own counterfeit savior of the world, he also is creating his own counterfeit Bibles. He'll put in just enough truth in these Bibles to draw many people in, but there will also be some deceptions interwoven in these translations. Jesus warns of this type of deception, when He told us that "a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump." In other words, only some of the Bible needs to be corrupted, and the corruption will eventually work it's way through its reader's very spirit.

Therefore, the great deception and falling away will come in many forms, but will have one main goal: that of distracting, or turning people away from the One True God and His One Way to heaven.

This deception will be in various forms. After all, people are different, and it takes different vices to tickle their flesh. The Bible tells us that the delusions will be so strong, that even the very elect could be deceived, if God allows. God will protect his true elect, and, as you will see, the elect will not be here for the full 7-year tribulation. However, I believe that they will also not be raptured before the tribulation either…

We handled the statue thing here and here among other places. Kelly discussed bible translations here. We have the Mediatrix discussion many times on this blog.  See here.

Candy likes to brag about using the best translation.  Well, in her opinion anyway.  But we have used this article several times to rebut that.   Here is the gist of it:

KJV advocates weave together many fantastic stories about the origins of the Alexandrian texts and the reason why we must reject their use in light of the TR. However, there is no credible historical evidence remotely hinting at the claim these texts were doctored by unorthodox apostates to secretly introduce theological heresy into the Christian faith. On the contrary, what they do demonstrate is how our sovereign God preserves His Word through the means of human instruments. A family of manuscripts discovered in the 1800s dating to just 200 years after Christ, apart from the typical variants, reads almost the same as all the other NT documents copied over a period of nearly 1600 years. Instead of denying God's preservation, they establish it.

I always think the best way to rebutt Candy's claim that people are Catholic because they don't know scripture, is to show a Catholic convert who absolutely knows scripture and in fact converted to Catholicism because of that knowledge!  So for your reading pleasure, I present Musings of  Catholic Convert  the Blog of a fomer Southern Baptist Pastor who became Catholic. His conversion story is here.  Oh and to prove that this gentleman really understood his scripture sources, here is an excerpt of his story:

story, how to become catholic, how to join catholic, southern baptist to catholic

I’ve never been adept at learning foreign languages, but for some reason Greek came fairly easy to me. I became so fond of Greek that I minored in it and took as many classes as I could. Studying the language opened my eyes to the depths of Scripture. It showed me how easily tools like interlinear texts and language concordances (like Strong’s) can be misused, leading to egregious theological error. Without a proper understanding of Greek language, writer/audience culture, and the historical context in which something was written you can really get into trouble. By the way, if you haven’t studied Koine or Classical Greek, you’re missing out. Not only is this a great apologetics tool, but also a wonderful aid to understanding of God’s Word (In addition to most of the NT being written in Greek, the OT of Christ’s time was a greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures called the Septuagint or LXX). It’s also a way to see what Aesop’s Fables REALLY say.
Studying Greek helped me to learn and apply sound hermeneutical principles so that I was not trying to interpret Scripture according to my own presuppositions (or at least admitting them up front). In fact, our professor would pick difficult passages in order to challenge our thinking, and then he would play devil’s advocate. This solidified good thinking, logical presentation/defense, and sound interpretation skills.
As a side note here, dispensational eschatology fell like a brick, and I realized that I had made critical errors in my assumptions about the end times. What a scary thing to be sitting in a pew and hear a minister (not just Baptists) telling you what “this word in the Greek” means, and then to hear him apply a meaning you know is nowhere near the word’s meaning or context. It didn’t happen often, but often enough to make me want to ALWAYS be sure I understood the passage in its context before I taught it. I took (and still take) the stricter judgement on teachers, as explained in the Bible, very seriously. As a result I read and studied everything as if my life depended on it. That doesn’t mean I didn’t make mistakes, but I knew what was required of me.
Greek did something else for me. In the advanced classes, we translated extra-biblical literature. We were sharpened in our language skills because nobody could fudge a translation simply because he/she had an english scripture memorized (and that is soooooooo easy to notice, and a bad practice to adopt). We translated Aesop, the Didache (teaching of the 12 Apostles), and even some of the Church Fathers. It was this step in my growth that made me want to know what the ancient Church REALLY looked like, especially after learning that the LXX contained the deuterocanonical books Protestants call “apocrypha”, and also after reading the practices and theology of the Church in writings like 1 Clement, and the Didache. They didn’t sound very Baptist to me and that made me uncomfortable. AND I found my hero, St. Polycarp (who is now my patron saint, along with St. Clement). What an awesome testimony to Jesus Christ! If you haven’t read about these guys, shame on you.

But more importantly, CANDY HAS NEVER REBUTTED OUR STRONG STATEMENTS THAT CATHOLICS DO NOT WORSHIP STATUES!  Ever. She just engages in "yes you do," "no we don't."   She has claimed to love Catholics, but apparently not to the point of having a serious dialogue or discussion with us. Because frankly folks, if she had to take us on in a fair forum, she would fail.











Please browse my eBay items!
Visit my new Amazon Store!

Candy and the Scripture Wall

This year it seems Candy has decided that a Christmas Tree is evil and bad (although last year she was all for it, although the post for that is now gone from her blog). She also admits she didn't know what a creche was and had to look that up. For some reason she would feel funny about having a little creche up in her home for Christmas as well. But writing scriptures on paper on the wall with some garland is good. Whatever.

Kelly tackled the Christmas tree argument last year here with this well researched article.

The Season of Advent

If you read Candy's blog for any length of time you'll know that one of her biggest gripes about Catholicism is that she thinks Catholics do not read the bible.

She couldn't be more wrong. These next few weeks, Catholics all over the world will be steeped in the Old Testament testament as we build our Jesse Trees and get use the season of Advent to prepare for Christ's birth. And for us (as well as other liturgical churches- nod to the Lutheran Ladies) Christmas is more than one day! We call it The Season of Christmas where once again we look into the sacred scriptures surrounding the birth of Jesus.

On my other blogs I have a lot of links to help prayerfully reflect on the Season of Advent and to prepare for the coming of Christ's birth. I am also putting an Advent Calendar in our side bar. It should be obvious to anyone who wants to see the truth that Catholics do indeed not only read the scriptures, but incorporate them into our daily lives.

My Domestic Church: Tis the Season - Advent! Mega Links