[I_Am_Nous]

The main concern there would be vital information being watered down or skipped over, but that bird flew the coop 500 years ago during the Protestant Reformation when people developed their own theologies and decided what was important for themselves, and then taught others.

Plus, it's not like the Reformation happened out of nowhere. The Catholic Church made lots of mistakes and awful decisions for a long time before people had enough.

I'm Catholic, and my favorite devotion is Divine Mercy. One of the teachings of the devotion (direct from Jesus, according to Sister Faustina) is that what hurts him the most is when people can't accept his mercy after death. They believe their sins are greater than his mercy (which is infinite) and they send themselves to hell as a result.

Jesus wants to be merciful to all, but he also said (Matthew 5:6, Matthew 18:21-35) that those who are merciful are the ones who receive mercy.

So if everyone walked around being merciful and forgiving one another, we'd certainly be a lot better off!

[pstuart]

I can't accept Christ's mercy after I die because I'll be dead and won't exist anymore.

I'm glad that you find solace and meaning in your faith, but you may be too close to it to realize that the Church exists to control you, not to bring you salvation.

It's a personal choice, and I respect that, but my original point is that there's an undercurrent of war to remove this choice and that gets ignored by people such as yourself because you already live in such a world and you like it.

The analogy I like to use is this: imagine if there was a revolution and somehow muslim evangelicals took charge of the government and put the state under Sharia Law. This has happened in other countries, it's not pure fantasy.

Now think about if you'd like to live in that society. I can guess what the answer might be.