Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?

[The Grand Nudger]

Are you saying that there are no black swans!?!?!

Yup.  See what I mean?  (I know you don't, lol...  )

Methodists, the best hymns?  Dude......you need to go to a Black Southern Baptist service (it;s where lapsed catholics go when they don;t want to feel guilty but can;t sit through the boringness).  Tell me who's that writin!

Yeaaaah...can't do the gospel thing...must be some lingering Presbyterian stodginess. I mean they're DANCING! in church. How can that be!?!

-and because of that awesomeness..I'll give you the elaboration that a human being deserves - rather than what a christer automaton can expect from me.

I;m not telling you what is or isn;t okay with your personal faith..but I would point out, that even framing a question as-such implicitly claims that one version of faith is lesser than another......  

Are you "growing" into catholicism, or degenerating into it?  

I'd say neither, in a vacuum (though in your case it does seem like a degenerate change) but even expressing it as such exposes the fluidity of doctrine and authority that you accept, internally.  One faith tradition tells us that much of what the other maintains to be infallibly true is childishly silly - OFC there was no talking snake.  Some here think that you must feel dissonance, but I don't think so, given how tenuous any authoritative voice on the god subject obviously is, for you.  Today, the "early church fathers" get your respect, but not so long ago they were base simpletons. I'm still at that point, where I recognize that they were base simpletons. Even your hero aquinas was bound, however smart he might have been, to being able to conclude only certain things, to share a specific view -of- those conclusions...and while you come away thinking that he proved god, in some sense, in a way that hasn't been refuted...I see him as having realized that he -couldn't- prove god...and perhaps not even having believed in the way that he is now mythologized to have believed...but, he lived at a certain time, and had to hold his tongue. His comments to the effect that christer god simply could not be arrived at purely by reason are as close to an affirmation of atheism as would have been less-than-lethal in his own time.