Hey all,
I've decided to set my doubts aside and accept Christ. (My handle is because I identify a lot with St. Thomas the Apostle, since I am a big doubter. I can only wish to see what he saw, though.)
The trouble is, what now? It seems to me that all flavors of Christianity have very serious flaws in their doctrine:
1) Orthodox/Catholic: A) I am highly uncomfortable with the whole Mary, saints, and icons thing. I know that they don't worship any of those, rather using them as a medium through which to approach God, but actual pagans would say the same things about their idols. The Mary thing especially, even though they claim they only offer hyperdulia to Mary, while God gets latreia, it seems to me to be semantic games to justify an existing Mary cult, which is merely a 'baptized' continuation of the age old 'Mother Goddess' tradition. Not to mention the flurry of novenas and chaplets to various saints, which seems to be far exceeding the 'it's just like asking your friends/neighbors to pray for you' analogy that is often given to justify it.
B) Unbiblical dogmas: This one is especially about Catholicism. Neither the Immaculate Conception nor the Assumption of Mary have much backing in anything except apocrypha and stories written centuries after the New Testament, and yet every Catholic must believe in those, since those are the two undisputed instances of the pope using his infallibility. Frankly this infallibility thing is very disturbing. Also, the church has contradicted itself. The council of Florence in Cantate Domino says that everyone outside the Catholic Church is definitely going to hell forever: "“The Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes and preaches that all those who are outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans but also Jews or heretics and schismatics, cannot share in eternal life and will go into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels, unless they are joined to the Church before the end of their lives; that the unity of this ecclesiastical body is of such importance that only for those who abide in it do the Church’s sacraments contribute to salvation and do fasts, almsgiving and other works of piety and practices of the Christian militia produce eternal rewards; and that nobody can be saved, no matter how much he has given away in alms and even if he has shed blood in the name of Christ, unless he has persevered in the bosom and unity of the Catholic Church” (“Cantate Domino,” 1441, ex cathedra)."
as does the bull Unam Sanctam in which Pope Boniface VIII says:
Urged by faith, we are obliged to believe and to maintain that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and also apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we confess with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sin… Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff."
while Lumen Gentium from Vatican II says:
"But the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Mohammedans… Nor is God far distant from those who in shadows and images seek the unknown God, for it is He who gives to all men life and breath and all things, and as Saviour wills that all men be saved. Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience. Nor does Divine Providence deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His grace strive to live a good life."
2) Protestant: I realize that 'Protestant' is a very broad term, yet the basic ideas (i.e. the five solae) seem to be the product of Luther selectively cherry picking the Scriptures, especially sola gratia, which Luther attempted to justify by taking James out of the Bible and calling it an "epistle of straw". While Luther didn't get with it, nor with removing Revelation, he did get rid of the apocrypha, presumably because II Maccabees mentions prayer for the dead.
Also the issue of the humongous amount of denominations. Jesus wanted us to be one church and said that the Spirit would lead us into all truth, but Protestants (unlike Catholics or Orthodox) don't seem to be even trying. Whenever someone disagrees with you, you can just start your own church. How can you possibly do that when God is not the author of confusion?
Not to mention the fact that the choice is either between lukewarm, dying 'mainline' churches, and fundamentalists who think evolution is a conspiracy and the Exodus literally happened.
3) Restorationist groups (Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.): These are just laughable. Mormonism is obviously a fraud made up by Joseph Smith. He changed his doctrine from Trinitarian to saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three different entities. There is absolutely no evidence of America being settled by Israelites in the 6th century BC, and that's just the beginning of the absurdities!
Likewise JW are renowned for their failed prophecy of Jesus' return in 1914 and again in the 70s, as well as their distortion of Scripture by changing John 1:1 to "the word was a god", which is essentially Arianism.
So what do I do? Do I just do my best to follow Jesus on my own? Yet we are supposed to be a community! Otherwise why are Paul's letters even in the Bible? He sure seemed to think we need to be a community, an ekklesia, forming the Body of Christ.
Essentially, this is your chance to defend your denomination and tell me why I should join, haha.
Just to mention that in Jerusalem the choice is basically:
1) Catholic Hebrew-speaking parish
2) Traditionalist Anglican
3) Southern Baptist
4) Reformed Baptist
5) Orthodox (but it seems that the churches here are more for tourists than actual parishes, I don't know how much they would be willing to cathechize and baptize me, and me being not Russian, Greek, or Arab would be a problem considering the close ties between Orthodoxy here and ethnicity).
6) Evangelical Lutheran