Really, this shouldn't have come as too big a surprise. For whatever reason, I'm not permitted to make a major change in my spiritual life for free. Sooner or later (usually sooner), someone will have a problem with my choices. And then I have to justify my decision.
You might question, and with good reason, why I comply with the process. Well, first of all, it happens whether I want it or not. But second, my opinion has long been that if you can't marshal an intellectual defense for something as important as your religion, either (A) you're pathetically ignorant about what you claim to believe in or else (B) maybe you just suck.
In any case, getting challenged about something means finding answers or else conceding the point, if not the entire discussion. And I'd rather not do that if the facts are available. I'll deal with this more in a minute.
But what this entire exchange has put into very sharp focus is how empty the evangelical side of the equation truly is. For example, they don't confess sins to a priest; they confess them to an accountability partner.
Let that sink in for a moment.
The evangelicals are willingly substituting the very reliable, very biblically-ordained sacrament of reconciliation for a very flawed, very limited and very glorified therapy session. But then again, a real therapist is bound by confidentiality ethics to never discuss you or your conversations with anybody. A Catholic priest has a sacred obligation to do likewise.
Neither of them can talk about you or your problems even if they're put under oath.
An accountability partner? Your best hope is they never blab your secrets to anybody. After all, the only thing stopping them is their own sense of honesty.
I wouldn't have been able to adequately answer that particular question had I never been challenged on it. But having been challenged, I sought out some resources and, in so doing, realized not only how essential confession is but how pathetically the evangelicals try to copy it with their little accountability partners while criticizing the sacrament itself.
So that's my side of it. But watching this person bumble around and try to justify the Protestant viewpoint of any given doctrine is kind of sad too. Catholics are often criticized for not being able to defend any of the Church's doctrines.
But, putting aside the arrogance of a johnny come lately organization like the evangelicals who demand their millennia-old predecessor justify itself, too often evangelicals in general and the evangelical with whom I was trading e-mails in particular are similarly unable to defend their doctrines. Or, ironically enough, recognize that many evangelical ideas are (recently) contrived, pale imitations of Catholic Church sacraments and doctrines.
Now, the last thing I would want is to give the impression that I'm bashing on the evangelicals. I'm not. And I wouldn't because I used to be one of them. My point through this entire thing has been the realization that evangelicalism mostly consists of butchered and watered down Catholic doctrines.
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