Why be good?

[Randy Carson]

I don't look for brownie points from any of these.  Of course I do want to keep my wife pleased but that is very different from abiding by all her dictates (not that she might not enjoy that at least for a while).

I'm sorry you can't see the difference.  C'est la vie.

Of course. It's completely different.

You have to please others for legitimate reasons. Christians only do it for the cookie. 

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Seriously, do you think that YOU as church leader would have authorized the reading of anything in Church on Sunday WITHOUT knowing who wrote it? I don't think so, either.

That of course totally ignores that there wasnt A church to read something on sunday until the late 4th century, when they finally became Roman state religion and found an agreement on which books to leave out and which to take.

And even after that there wasn't much of an agreement, since different brands of christianity were blooming all over the old world. The catholic fight against Arianism, which didn't accept the trinity, dominated the ensuing centuries with this line of thinking being very prominent amongst the Goths, who pushed into the Italian Peninsula.

The early Church - the Church founded by Christ as promised in Matthew 16:18 - was that which was originally known as “the Way” (cf. Acts 24:14). Later, those individuals who followed Christ began to be called “Christians” beginning at Antioch (cf. Acts 11:26). As early as 107 A.D., those same individuals referred to themselves collectively as the “Catholic Church”. In a letter to the Church of Smyrna, Ignatius of Antioch wrote:

 

You must all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the Father, and the presbytery (priest) as you would the Apostles. Let no one do anything of concern to the Church without the bishop. Wherever the bishop appears, let the people be there; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church (Letter to the Smyrnaeans, A.D. 107, [8,1])

 
Notice that Ignatius does not take pains to introduce the term "Catholic Church"; instead he uses it in a manner suggesting that the name was already in use and familiar to his audience. This further suggests that the name, Catholic Church, had to have been coined much earlier in order to have achieved wide circulation by the time of this writing. In other words, the Christian assembly was calling itself the Catholic Church during the lifetime of the last Apostle, John, who died near the end of the first century. John, the beloved disciple, may have thought of himself as a member of the Catholic Church!
 
The Catholic Church began with Peter and the Apostles and continued without interruption or cessation through their disciples (Ignatius, Irenaeus, Polycarp, Clement, Justin Martyr, etc.) down to the present day. As a side note, it appears that the believers in Antioch may have coined both terms still in use today: “Christian” and “Catholic Church” – terms they used to describe the one body of believers in Christ.