The problem of circular reasoning in apologetics

The problem of circular reasoning in apologetics

            You ever been in conversations where someone tries to prove their argument simply by stating their argument?

“The Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon”, the Baptist preacher may say.  And then give you Bible verses that he thinks support that.  However, if a Catholic doubts their faith, or, someone is a member of his congregation, these people may be predisposed to believe this. 

I think another good example of this is when the Mormons (stop calling me a “Roman” Catholic, and I’ll stop calling you Mormon), is when the LDS missionary at your door tries to prove Mormonism by claiming that his testimony is from the Holy Ghost.  If you know Mormon theology, you’d know that the Holy Ghost isn’t considered omnipresent.  (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/doctrines-of-the-gospel-student-manual/5-the-holy-ghost?lang=eng), so, how exactly can the Holy Ghost testify to your Mormon missionary when he’s busy testifying to other Mormon missionaries thousands of miles away in different time zones?

And, it’s not like we Catholics don’t have this problem, too.  A good example is the Radical Catholic Reactionaries, who think we should only go to the Latin Mass.  NOW, I have nothing wrong with the Latin Mass, but, it being “ancient”, is, one, both, not true, and, two, the modern Latin Mass is actually a revision.  TLM doesn’t stand for Traditional Latin Mass, it stands for TRIDENTINE Latin Mass.  As in, the Council of Trent.  It’s actually not entirely possible to know what the oldest liturgy is (I personally believe it’s some variation of the Syriac Rite), but, “it’s old, therefore, it’s better”, is not a good argument.  Neither is the inverse. 

One last one, is the canon of scripture.  The Bible doesn’t list which books are in The Bible, but, sometimes you will hear that you can figure out which books are in scripture by reading other books in scripture.  But, we don’t know which books are scripture, by definition.  Confused?  Me too. 

Follow me on MeWe: https://mewe.com/i/adamcharleshovey

 Gettr:https://gettr.com/user/adamchovey (I was banned from Parler early 2022)

And Rumble:  https://rumble.com/user/AdamCSC