My name, John Bugay, has some notoriety in the world of Catholic apologetics, and as a result, the word “anti-Catholic” has appeared in connection with my name in some search engines. This blog post is in response to several items that appear in conjunction with searches for my name.
I am “anti-Catholic” in the sense that I am a former (devout) Catholic, and through an investigation of the Bible and church history, I have decided to leave that institution. That’s not being “anti-Catholic”. That’s simply “becoming a Protestant”.
The last 200 years have placed the Bible and Christianity itself under an intensive “historical-critical” microscope, and it is clear that both of these have resoundingly passed that test. A hundred years ago, a skeptic like Bertrand Russell questioned whether Jesus was even a real historical person. Now there is no question he was. Even the most strident skeptics today must admit that’s the case.
On the other hand, historical research into the origins of “Roman Catholicism” have not turned up so kindly, to the point that a Roman Catholic Biblical Scholar like John Meier is even quoted as having said that the papacy “cannot give a credible historical account of its own origins”. It is simply false to suggest that Matthew 16:18 constituted the origin of the papacy, and the entire world of New Testament scholarship knows this. But that is not something that has yet filtered out to the general population. And one might understand why the official Roman Catholic Church would not want that information to become widely known among its adherents.
I have written extensively on very many facets of the Roman Catholic Church. Here are a few older items that give a good overview of what I have learned.
My favorite posts at Beggars All:
The See of Peter
The Birth of the Inquisition
The Roman Catholic Hermeneutic
The Integrity of the New Testament Canon
Christianity is Growing but Rome is Sinking
From Reformation500.com
A Few Words About My Method
Thumbs up or thumbs down on Rome
The Unity of the Church
How Roman Catholics Mis-use Scripture:
Ratzinger's Dishonesty about Exegesis
1 Tim 3:15: The pillar and ground of the truth
John 16:13: On being guided into all truth
The Real Body of Christ
The Catholic Historical Method
This blog post is also posted at http://reformation500.blogspot.com, which is an older blog that I had, which I’ve decided to pull out of the mothballs, in order to talk at a personal level about the Reformation, Roman Catholicism, and perhaps family and personal issues.
This blog post is also posted at http://reformation500.com/2013/06/17/john-bugay-on-catholicism-some-older-blog-posts/.
Well, I think that generally, the word "anti-Catholic" is quite unfair.
ReplyDeleteIf you add up the sum total of Evangelical apologetics on the internet and then add up the sum total of RC apologetics on the internet, you will find that RC apologetics focus far more on Protestantism than Evangelical apologetics focus on RCC.
I have seen many RCC youtube epologists strangely bashing James White, but using other Evangelical apologists to take down Islam or Atheism.
So looks like we are being nice in not calling them "anti-Protestants", because their anti-Protestantism is more concentrated than the anti-Catholicism of most Evangelical apologists.
Thanks Rooney -- I wanted to do two things with these couple of posts: first, to create new posts with my name and the appropriate keywords, to push the negative things down and off the first search page. The second thing I want to do is just to simply explain what I'm doing in words that contrast with what the others have said.
DeleteWhat many people in our day have failed to realize is that the Reformation has gone on now for some 500 years without a resolution. However, more current historical research sheds incredible new light on who was right, and who was wrong during that time. We owe it to ourselves to follow up with that information.
Hi John,
DeleteBeing anti isn't all that bad is it?
After all, people afraid of polemics are afraid of truth, aren't they?
And as much as you seed those keyword clouds, I'm guessing that Dave and his cronies can seed more.
Maybe if you get something catchy on You Tube- say a Bugay boogie. Something Gangnam style.
Cuz I don't think Dave and his cronies can boogie...
Hi Ron -- As you may be aware, I've been looking for a job lately, in a fairly specialized area. I think some of the negative comments may have hurt me in one or two opportunities that I may have had. Of course, I have no way of knowing that's the case, but it still seems worth the effort to move some of that stuff down, or at least to explain it in a way that addresses the broader audience at the same time. Puts those things into perspective.
DeleteYouTube does tend to boost your rankings, and I've been experimenting with Vine (#johnbugay, @johnbugay), but I don't quite know how to get anything I say into a six-second little video.