kmerian gets no answer

A couple of days ago, kmerian responded to a post over at Carrie's blog:

Carrie, what is your point with these posts? Is it your contention that the Bible is very easy to understand?

I started to respond over there, but recovered my resolve to avoid posting there. Here's my reply, kmerian; I hope it helps.

kmerian,

I see it has been two days, and unsurprisingly you have no answer to your question.

I suggest that when Carrie neglects to specify her point, we must take our cue from one of the first posts on her blog, where she wrote:

First, I want to educate other Protestants on Roman Catholicism as I believe it is important to understand that the gospel of Rome is not the Gospel of Christ. This involves not only looking at what the Roman Catholic Church teaches, but also refuting the erroneous claims by Catholic e-pologists.

Hence, I suppose we are to understand posts like this as an attempt to "educate Protestants."

But it seems to me that there is a problem with this supposition when it comes to posts like this one. That is, I don't see how it can be construed as being particularly "educational." It's more of a scare quote, devoid of explanation or context, so that it appears to have more the intention of making the Catholic Church look bad in the eyes of Protestants who perhaps don't share Carrie's apparent hatred of the Catholic Church.

Why do I say that? Because Carrie has enough sense to know that if she wants others to understand what the Catholic Church teaches, she ought to be quoting from the Catechism, and from councils, and from encyclicals. If she really wants to "educate" Protestants as to what we believe, she ought to be drawing from magisterial sources.

I strongly suspect that her purpose in doing this is precisely for the scare value. The Catechism isn't, I suppose, sufficiently controversial in terms of its expression of doctrine.

Why would that matter? Because if she simply presents what the Church teaches - from official sources - she will be obliged to explain why it's wrong (if she can), and she will be obliged to defend herself when we correct her with additional explication from the same sources.

This being the case - that she apparently prefers to go for shock value rather than for substance - I can only conclude that she is not truly interested in educating anybody, but rather in propagandizing them so as to persuade them to hate the Catholic Church as she apparently does. Consequently I believe that these posts may be categorized as nothing more than attempts to poison the well, and to the extent that I'm correct they do not constitute an argument, and they are not genuinely educational. I'm standing by this thesis until or unless she satisfactorily demonstrates that I'm wrong.