You were never in the arena with your belief that scripture is not the highest authority, and you don't even defend what you think to be higher.
Despite the various versions and translations, it is agreed by Christians that the Bible is God's word. You propose ridiculous arguments to avoid the point of my posts, that Catholics believe in incontrovertible truths outside of scripture. I am still waiting for defense of such an idea and the more difficult task of determining which "traditions" of many should be taken to be dogma. Surely not all traditions are dogma, ie; do Catholics still require the tradition of women covering their hair?
I do not need to defend what is a de facto reality. There is a tradition in charge of Scripture. For instance, in regards to your last question, if we were strictly to use the plain sense of Scripture with no use of any tradition, then let us see what the Scripture says of covering hair:
But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with
her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven.
6For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.
So while you're calling it a tradition, it is in Scripture. For the Orthodox, there are three types of Tradition:
1. The Apostolic Tradition, which includes Scripture and the proper understanding of Scripture. This Tradition was preserved, in its entirety, in the Church, through the succession of the Presbyters in the Church (Irenaeus, Adversus Heraesus). The Tradition is both the Scripture itself, as well as what Deacon Michael Hyatt quite succinctly called the "ultimate exegesis of the Scripture".
2. Traditions of man, which include things such as the styles of music and art, methods of sermon delivering, practices outside of the liturgical worship of the Church which, though manmade, do not cause harm to the Apostolic Tradition. This can be things like the American tradition of having Coffee Hour after Liturgy, Sunday School before, and Bible/Faith Studies throughout the week.
3. Traditions against the Faith, which are traditions which might have started as manmade practices, but were raised up to a point where they became a harm to the Faith itself. Such practices could be the over-legalization of the Pharisees, which is the reason why the Orthodox Church recently declared the Old Calendarists, specifically those who said if you did not use the Julian Calendar that you were sinning, to be a formal heresy. While there are still disagreements over which calendar to use in the liturgical practice, to remain in Communion in the Orthodox Church, one must not declare those who use the other calendar to be heretics, or else you have committed an act of heresy, declaring the manmade calendar to be a divine dogma. Pretty much any practice can become this, and there are even some manmade traditions mentioned in Scripture, such as the tradition of head-covering. As long as one does not raise these manmade traditions above or to the level of Apostolic Tradition, then one is not sinning as the Pharisees did. To reference an example of this kind of sin more familiar in the West, one could look to the KJV Onlyists, who have raised the manmade tradition of a single translation of Scripture to a level equal to the declarations of the Apostles themselves.
The fact is that, unlike Protestants, RCC and Orthodox are honest with themselves that there has to be something above Scripture, because Scripture was not bound together in a single volume after John finished his writing. The Apostles and Prophets did not provide us with a Table of Contents. Man made that themselves long after the Scriptures were finished. And that Table of Contents has a higher authority than all of Scripture combined, because if it is changed, then Scripture itself is fundamentally altered. Changing the Canon of Scripture is akin to changing the Address Registry in a CPU. If you wipe an address from that register, then the information stored in that address will never effect the running of the computer. It will never be accessed or used. It will be as if that address never existed. And removing that registry will likely disable whatever program depended on the registry address, if it were an important portion of that program. In this case, the programs are your dogmas. Changing the Scripture changes the dogmas that Scripture teaches.
