MY REAL-LIFE CONNECTION TO POPE LEO Sure, I'm Catholic, so the bishop of Rome is always significant to me. But I have a closer connection to Pope Leo in particular (I promise I'm not making this up): I have met and shaken hands with a man who spoke to someone on the phone whose dentist's sister is the neighbor of the pope's brother. True story.

Wife of Catholic apologist Trent Horn has brain cancer and will have a brain operation tomorrow. Laura is a nice, funny, and chatty faith-filled woman. She and her husband released a podcast about it yesterday. Please pray for the surgery's success and for healing, but especially for spiritual perseverance and fidelity to the end.

The United Church of God denies the doctrine of the trinity primarily by arguing that the Holy Spirit is not a Third Person, but a power. I'd say their more fundamental error is believing that the Father and Son "are two separate Beings that comprise the God Family." UCG thinks one day there will be many more than just two. That's straight-up pagan polytheism, which goes against everything traditional Catholicism stands for. It's chief among the reasons I insist UCG and others like the cannot be properly call "Christian."

Since many Saturday-sabbatarians accuse Catholics of worshipping the sun god because we meet on SUNdays, does that mean they give tribute to Frigg -- the Norse goddess of love, marriage, and fertility -- when they attend their FRIday night Bible studies? Both are absurd. #sabbath #sunday #COG

Some say Catholicism is false because true Christian tradition was corrupted beyond recognition within the first couple centuries. Yet many who say this also claim ancient Babylonian religion under Nimrod remains alive and well and intact throughout the world -- best represented by Catholicism. How does Nimrod keep a religion going for four or five thousand years -- but Jesus can't hold the gates of hell off his Church for a century?

There is a false gospel I grew up with that says "God is reproducing himself." But it's a logical absurdity to say God can create a: - creator of all things - self-existent being - omnipotent being - etc. It's as nonsensical as saying God can create a squared triangle.

If anyone asks you to pray for him, who is so heartless and stupid as to answer, "No way, brother, I'm no mediator between you and God. You have direct access to Jesus Christ, our one mediator. You go straight to God yourself!"?

I sense in my own life that asking for prayers and intercessions from the saints in heaven has made a real difference in my life. I am closer to God because of it. "The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects" (James 5:16 RSV-CE). It's hard to find a more righteous person than someone who's finished the race -- already in heaven.

The world will not be saved by Bitchat, Bitcoin, Nostr, Monero, Linux, or any other "freedom tech" (as cool as some of these things are). Neither will anarchy, burning down buildings, defunding the police, queer theory, or toppling governments by force (as uncool as these things are). The only real solution to the world's problems is already in motion, and in fact is guaranteed: the Kingship of Christ. Death is our greatest enemy, not Republicans or Dems or Musk or Islam or the Jews. Without exeption, every one of us will leave this world behind. For some of us, that will be very soon. Death, however, is ultimately destroyed in Jesus. Stop wasting your time. Repent, believe the gospel, be baptized, and live according to this faith. Pray. Once this life is over -- and that can happen in the blink of an eye -- nothing else will matter. Your BTC or XMR seed phrase won't do you any good at your personal judgment, which no one will escape. Christ is King.

SHOULD CHRISTIANS SHUN PHILOSOPHY? Every Christian Fundamentalist knows that false theology exists. They are happy to explain that to you. In its place, they desire TRUE theology. On the other hand, many are opposed to philosophy. There exists "philosophy...not according to Christ" (Colossians 2:8), but, similar to theology, it should be subverted by TRUE philosophy -- a love of wisdom and right reason that follows truth. Everyone -- including all who profess to be Christian -- uses philosophy. They just might not recognize it, because they don't know what philosophy actually is, thinking it's always bad. Can anyone seriously divorce true philosophy from the Bible, such as the books of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon? To attempt this would be utterly unreasonable. Not only does it go against good philosophy, but good theology.

I know we are supposed to be the clay, with Jesus as the Potter. But sometimes I feel like old, dried, cracked, crumbly clay that doesn't want to cooperate or conform to his hands. I have to trust he knows how to (and wants to) rejuvenate the clay of my soul, so that he can smooth out my imperfections and gently bake me in the oven at just the right temperature (in his all-wise and merciful judgment) to make me a piece of art -- rather than a piece of ... something else.

Non-Catholic "Christians" who claim the imagery of Madonna and Child came from paganism (e.g., Nimrod and his mother) don't understand that their argument undermines the biblical account of Mary and Jesus. They care so much about discrediting the Catholic Church as false Christianity that they shoot themselves in the foot while doing it. And they are unaware of their self-inflicted wound.

If there are two separate "God Beings" (Father and Son), then there's no reason to close the door to the idea there could be three or four of them -- or even billions. As reasonable trinitarians, we cannot entertain the possibility of more than one God. That would be nonsensical: there cannot be more than one "First Cause," or more than one all-powerful Being. If the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, then these Persons must fully possess the one divine nature. One God (in nature, or "being"), but three in Persons. This is very different from the pagan view of a family of multiple "God beings."

God is indeed a Family. But that doesn't mean God reproduces himself by spawning new "God Beings," because there can only be one God -- one uncreated, Uncaused Cause. A finite creature cannot become the infinite God. Yet we can be "adopted" (to use the biblical term) into God's family and share in his divine life.

As a Catholic, I'm not less mindful, but more mindful of sin compared to my pre-Catholic days, when I would clean out bread crumbs from my home in preparation for the spring festival of Unleavened Bread. In years past, I thought "de-leavening" my home and car was how to prepare for the annual commemoration of Jesus' death. Now, as a Catholic, I understand that fasting, prayers, adoration, and confession are what I need to prepare for the Paschal observances. Something is wrong when people snacking on unleavened brownies make fun of those who solemnly observe Lent .

Christians who are sincere but not well formed in their faith are susceptible to COG media campaigns that actively seek to "sow discord" among Christian families. Often this comes in the form of proclaiming Christmas and Easter as "pagan" or sinful to observe, or that Sunday is the "day of the Sun" and therefore you should worship on the Sabbath (Saturday), or that we were not created with an immortal soul, or that we should not eat "unclean meats" as detailed in Leviticus. The result of believing their message is family division and a distorted view of the fundamentals of the Christian religion. The antidote to this is to prayerfully meditate on Scripture, to read the writings of Early Church fathers as well as saintly Christians throughout the ages, and to study a good, traditional Catholic catechism. If you're ever stumped by anti-Catholic arguments, don't throw up your hands and quit -- go find answers. Seek the help of others. There is hardly a "new" anti-Catholic argument that hasn't been debunked long, long ago.

QUESTION FOR PROTESTANTS: If the apostolic decision at the council of Jerusalem had never been documented in the book of Acts (chapter 15), would their decision still have been true and binding on all Christians? Of course! Christian teaching does not *originate* in the Bible -- it is *reflected* in the Bible in a uniquely inspired way. In other words, the Body of Christ is not a Bible-based Church; rather, the Bible is a Church-based Book! The idea that we are only obliged to believe what we ourselves perceive the Scriptures to explicitly teach is not biblical, is not historical, is not workable. Something can be true and binding even if we don't have a chapter-and-verse prooftext for it -- just as Peter and James and the others had no such "verse" proving Jewish converts do not need to practice ritual circumcision.

Has there ever been an ancient pagan religion that believed we have immortal souls which will be reunited with our own bodies, glorified, in a resurrection from the dead? I've never seen evidence of it.

It's weird to say we need a plain Bible verse for all our religious beliefs, insisting we should reject philosophy and "human reasoning," but then say a person can come to know of God's existence by reason alone. We can't separate theology from philosophy. No one can.