"Socrates was not a Belgian, the Paris Underground is not a revolutionary movement and the essential tenet of Zen Buddhism is not every man for himself."
At the National Catholic Register, Mark Shea links yours truly concerning last week's conversation with Apologetics 315 on the recommendation of John MacArthur's lectures on "The Heresies of the Catholic Church."

It is fair to point out that Apologetics 315 took down that post.  The blog proprietor, Brian Auten, explained in his last comment:

Unfortunately, this blog post has proven to be more harm than help, I think, which is not what I had hoped for. In addition, it has been more polemics and not apologetics, which is not the core purpose of the site. I think there is much to learn about both sides of the issue, and MacArthur has generated more heat than light. I am going to take this resource offline.

I commend Brian for his charity.  He posted the link in good faith. He discovered that the tone of MacArthur's talks were offensive to Catholics and fair-minded Protestants. So, he took down the link as being counter-productive to his objective of promoting Christian apologetics.

It is also fair to say that I learned a lot from my exposure to MacArthur, but not what MacArthur hoped I would learn.  I learned that there is a reason for all the bad, strawmen arguments that are made about Catholicism; there are some really ignorant Protestant teachers who are still teaching their congregations that nonsense.

For example, I was surprised beyond the limits of imagination that MacArthur - who, again, has written lots of books and runs a seminary in Southern California - would rely on Loraine Boettner's long discredited list of "Catholic Inventions."  Mark Shea observes:

I know what you’re going to say. That a candle is a sign of light and hope and that it’s just a gesture of love to God, to his saint, and to the people you are praying for. You might even note that in the Old Covenant, lights were lit in the Tabernacle as a sign of prayer to and love of God. You might even note that the author of Revelation saw the Church represented by a lampstand (Revelation 1:20). You’ll probably even say that the idea of accumulating merit from the treasury of saints just so long as the candle burns never entered your mind (not that there’s no such thing as merit, of course. It’s actually a very sensible idea.).


But what do you know? You’re just a stupid Catholic who believes everything he’s told. The people who uncritically regurgitate whatever MacArthur tells them are way smarter than you. They think for themselves when they cut and paste claims like the one above without a movement of the gray matter. It is as critical, self-aware intellects that they paste and repaste the list of Roman Catholic Inventions , credulously swallowing the urban legend that it comes from a former priest who saw the light and completely ignorant of the fact that it originates with professional anti-Catholic Loraine Boettner. They are also ignorant of the fact that The List contain such obvious falsehoods ...

Read the whole thing.