So several days ago I was watching a Trent Horn video where he responded to a Seventh Day Adventist allegedly converted from Catholicism, who was posting a number of reasons why he left the RCC.
Some of the SDA's reasons were better than others, but none was bulletproof. It might edify other Adventists or confuse poorly catechized Catholics, but wouldn't convince anyone who wasn't already on Team Ellen White.
To be fair, it was probably a half hour video, and you can only cover so much ground, but it was a critical research failure spoiling oversight of simple details; like, despite looking up instructions on a Catholic web site, reporting that the Rosary consists of "at least 33 Hail Marys"--okay, 53 is technically at least 33, but huh?--and basing the old canard that Catholics removed the prohibition of images in worship from the Ten Commandments on the strategy of directing the attention of the viewer to the paragraph below the one with that text. I guess the line between incompetence and malice is malfeasance.
At the risk of sounding condescending, I got a sense more that these are the things he was told as a child when he asked his parents why they started going to a new building on Saturday nights, and stopped taking him to the pretty church on Sunday mornings.
Most of the other reasons relied on assuming up front that SDA doctrines were true, because there's no way a mere mortal is going to have access to the supernatural knowledge that sacraments are inefficacious or Mary is dead/in soul sleep. Not without some divine intervention that would have been his #1 reason, which it wasn't.
Even though half an hour is kind of long for even a top ten list, I would have expected a little more depth to his positive arguments. But they were all on this level.
Perhaps the most interesting was his claim that that Bible was clear that Mary was dead. In fact, the Bible is completely silent on Mary's demise. He can only infer her death by looking at extrabiblical data on life exptectancies and taking as axiomatic that Mary did not receive any exceptional treatment like Elijah.
Sure, it's a reasonable inference or assumption for a non-Catholic, but the Bible doesn't actually say so. This ended up being a common theme in my overall experience.
I got involved in the comments section, just meaning to make a couple points, but got dragged into it with someone who might have been a troll, and I remembered why I drifted away from religion arguments online in the first place, and have been quiet lately after I got sick of politics as well. God bless 'im, but I don't have Trent Horn's charitable patience.
Talking with one of the commenters was...not much like talking to another person. He expressed some satisfaction that I could cite a chapter here or a verse there, but his interest seemed to lie in proving Mary was dead in her grave.
By way of example, he tried to demonstrate that Moses was not. And a few general references to the resurrection and general judgment at the end of the world--none of which speak to exceptions that both of us make. Him, Elijah and Moses; me, Elijah and Mary--but maybe also Moses; I know that I don't know and that the Scriptures aren't explicit.
The discussion was difficult. He didn't seem interested in Trent's defense of Mary or the communion of saints, and seemed to think I would find it novel to consider praying directly to Jesus. I said I do both, and she does the same anyway, so what does it hurt? He told me to prove from scripture that Mary prays to Jesus in heaven.
I said pretty much everyone does. I think if I'd suggested that ligaments hold bones together, he'd ask me to provide sources. He seemed to think that this was a linchpin in my argument--in the whole edifice of Mariology--because he kept coming back and pretending I had repeated this claim in new words instead of talking about other things, like why his Biblical claims were spurious.
I think I made a misstep here. I'm used to debating more mainline protestants, who mostly believe that Christians go to heaven right after death, and I think I got stuck between working on that basis and working on his belief in soul sleep--which in my defense Trent Horn had gone over in his video.
When I asked how he could know Mary was dead, he quoted something about the resurrection at the final judgment. That's nice, but it doesn't discuss Mary; he is relying again on extrabiblical sources that he hasn't disclosed in order to assume that Mary is not a special case.
His response: "Such as?"
Dude: You're the one making the claim that the Bible says Mary died. I'm not the one here who has to show the passage that states it, or the supporting extrabiblical documents that argue for such an interpretation of some Scripture. That Bible passage about the final judgment does not name or infer Mary, and by this point in the argument, we'd already visited the precedent of Elijah and Moses, so there's no way to fall back on "Well, everyone." In retrospect, I think he was trying to dodge this and make me or his audience think that I'm being coy about extrabiblical sources to prove something about Mary, and I need to come out and 'fess up more than he needs to participate in dialog as if we were both adults.
I wasn't buying Moses, though. I pointed out that Jude 1:9 is about the handling of his body, not the status of his soul. But he insisted that was sufficient proof.
Man, no it's not. It's not proof of anything. It's not even a reference to the Old Testament. It's to a lost book called the Assumption of Moses or the Testament of Moses, and we only know about it from Jewish tradition and a Patristic reference to this book as a possible source for Jude's comment.
I pointed out two more things to him: (1) He's made enough maneuvering room in his "Bible-based" doctrines for the same thing the Catholics do, but he only allows it to be applied to Moses and not Mary, based on Scripture that doesn't spell out that she died or that he was raised (2) He's not even quoting Bible verses anymore.
"Well," he demurred--I'm paraphrasing, sorry--"I usually don't get much traction quoting Scripture to Catholics, since they don't know it."
Well, I kept up with you when you started out doing that, and you were nice enough to admit it. So why stop when I beat him to the punch on citing one of the most cryptic verses in the New Testament?
I'd had about enough at this point. If I said something he thought I'd buckle under trying to defend, he'd attack, but if not, he'd go back to insisting I prove from Scripture that Mary prays to Jesus in heaven, as if all the intervening comments never happened.
That is confusing enough just to read. Maybe he thought he was keeping me on my back foot by never giving a straight answer when he could press me to prove something that had been addressed in Trent's video. Maybe he didn't like it--Trent's own video, including the clips from the original, was a little more than an hour, so he didn't have room for extensive dissertations either--but even if Moses was assumed into heaven the way we believe Mary was, he hadn't given any evidence that actually pointed to it--and wouldn't when asked, except to insist that what he didn't admit were Ellen White's mystical interpretations were both interpretations and correct. It's not like I really know Moses is normal-dead, but this is leaning way over the line into "Shakespeare indicated the door was blue to symbolize the sorrow and vastness of..." territory.
There’s a difference between claiming a verse or passage means something, and explaining how it does. If he had attempted the latter without merely gainsaying me and moving on like my concerns were both put to bed and not worth discussing, I might have continued under the presumption that he was either honest or competent enough to be worth dialoging with.
Maybe he was assuming some interpretations and then assuming I'd just pick them up. But whether it's true or not, whether it's intended or not, this stuff is not what the Bible literally says.
And maybe he was trying to do the same kind of thing I was trying to do: me, forcing him to admit that his creative interpretations and smuggling in assumed conclusions is the same thing he accuses Catholics of doing; and he, forcing me to admit that if Mary's not in heaven because she's in soul sleep then she naturally wouldn't be praying for us.
Since I brought it up, here's Jude 9: "But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him, but said 'The Lord rebuke you.'" That's not even about Moses; it's incidental. It's a specific example showcasing Michael's humility. You can compare other translations if you want to see for yourself. Spirits fighting over a holy man's body does seem like an unusual situation--in fact, it's so rare I don't think there are any other cases we can make a comparison to or draw expectations from--but from that and the fact that the text doesn't rule it out only leaves us with speculations. So maybe it's true. But we can't honestly say the Bible sews it up.
So I told him I was done. His response? "But I asked you one thing, to prove Mary prays to Jesus in heaven. Now you bow out?" Yeah, because you're rude and incoherent. You haven't responded directly to anything I've claimed except to bogart Mary's privileges for Moses. But a nonanswer isn't really an answer.
I suggested if he was interested in honest discussion to pay more attention to the channel and the professionals in the combox. But no, now he reveals that he had been a Catholic for thirty years so he was already well familiar with all our doctrines that just don't make sense.
If he really were, he'd already be familiar with the arguments for the Assumption, and that we don't put Scripture exclusively above Tradition. Instead, he sounds more like the guy Trent Horn deconstructed.
Yeah, I ended up effectively sidestepping his question. But he should have already known the answer, and my point was to show him that he actually uses a similar hermeneutic to support his own beliefs, so either we both might be right and we have to look in other directions or we're both wrong. After all, even if you take a strong view of Biblical self-sufficiency, that's still not the same thing as mandatory Biblical sufficiency.
Maybe it would have helped if I’d more directly addressed his demand for a passage. Like: “Why do I have to cite a prooftext?” As I said, if he really was an ex-Catholic who left because he plumbed too deeply and found problems, he’d know and understand what I was getting at without me having to point it out; but his double standard, I suspect, would have been too overt to elide.
I mean, man, come on: You come onto a Catholic channel for a video that discusses soul sleep as a widely recognized error--and it's a public space, I'm not saying you're not welcome--and pick fights with everyone who will listen to you, tuning out when they don't stay on your script, to prove to you that Mary is asleep-dead but Moses isn't...
...and the problem is that I, just I, am not telling you what you want to hear?
I think you're already getting what you want.
If I talk to him again, I'll apologize on behalf of his catechists for failing him as profoundly as those who failed the guy who did the original video, who failed him so badly he couldn't even count to 53.
Because it's that or he's a character out of a Chick Tract.
