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Is there anything Rome's defenders won't do? You start to wonder.
This morning I turned on my computer, and as I had been expecting since I had dared to make comment concerning issues relating to Patricia Bonds and Steve Ray, we had already heard from Steve Ray, and so we found some more responses offered, including one by Mrs. Bonds.
All of them share one thing, that is, they're very shrill and they're very insulting. And I think that speaks volumes, given what I had said and the fact that on one side you have documentation, on one side you have argumentation, on the other side, like Steve Ray's side, you just simply have ad hominem dismissive argumentation and insult.
And so, once again, this is illustrative of what you're dealing with, with modern Roman Catholic apologists, especially the ones who seemingly are amongst the most popular. If you can't refute them with sound arguments, it seems that people like Steve Ray and Art Sippo and others are more than happy to attack your parents, attack your heritage, your family, get very personal in their approach.
As I've said many times, it never crossed my mind to start digging into the family backgrounds of Catholic apologists. I remember very clearly, and I have mentioned this before, sitting in a chat channel shortly after Mrs. Bonds' conversion and watching young Roman Catholic apologists discussing how they could look into the family histories of various of us.
They specifically were talking about Erick Svensson and seeing if they could find out if there were, you know, get hold of people who maybe had once been Roman Catholics to see about converting them or, you know, who are their family members, so on and so forth.
It was shocking. It was disgusting, personally, because no one who has any meaningful love of truth would engage in this kind of behavior. We know that Mr. Ray certainly doesn't, and Art Sippo is well known for his incredible behavior.
But all of that aside, it once again illustrates this massive divide that exists between those who seek to present a meaningful defense of their faith and those who promote Romanism. That's the way I would describe this is Romanism.
It's almost cultic in its fanatical devotion and the lengths that it leads people to. I really hold men like Steve Ray and Art Sippo and the others—I'm going to throw Patrick Madrid in there, too, he's certainly been an enabler—I hold them accountable for abusing a 52-year-old divorcee, because that's what they're doing here.
They are abusing a 52-year-old divorcee. I think one of the reasons that Mrs. Bonds becomes so angry when I point this out is she knows in her heart of hearts that if she was not related to James White, then nobody—none of these people—would have given her the time of day.
They would not be putting her on television programs and radio programs. They would not be coming to her rescue. She knows, in her more sober moments of honesty and reflection, why these men do the things that they're doing, and I consider it downright abusive.
By the way, I used a word there that actually has meaning—divorcee. It's one of the examples, in my opinion, of the fact that Mrs. Bonds simply will not take responsibility for the many bad decisions she's made in life.
She doesn't even recognize the meaning of that word. What I mean by that is she was divorced. I remember very clearly, I was back east, and I was listening to her appearance on Catholic Answers Live on an old handspring visor.
I was so excited that that thing would actually play MP3 files. Anyway, I was walking through a Target store—for some reason I remember context with things like that—and she was talking about how grace is an actual substance, and that it had been infused into her marriage by Mary, and Mary had saved her marriage.
That was before the divorce. Divorce is a horrible thing, but the only thing worse than divorce is when you pretend it's not divorce. That's what's happened here. You see, in Roman Catholicism, there isn't a divorce, and we're all told that, and they're very much superior to us, because they don't have divorce, right?
Well, divorce happens. It's a sad thing. It happens to a lot of people, because we're sinners. But to call it something else—you see, when you take a marriage that has lasted for more than 20 years and produced three kids, and you call that an annulment, annulments happen 12 hours later when people sober up or something.
I can understand that. But when there are three kids, it sort of stretches the word annulment, don't you think? Yeah, I think so, too. It's just one of the many examples of historical revisionism, changing the meanings of words to make things something that they really were not.
I do want to provide just a couple of factual responses to the lengthy diatribe that Mrs. Bonds posted today. The irony is she didn't refute almost anything I said. The factual argumentation I provided, that she was never a member of Reformed Baptist Church, didn't attend Reformed Baptist Church, would have been excommunicated by Reformed Baptist Church, all of that went by the wayside and was not responded to.
Instead, she took a phrase, and I went back and listened to my video, and in passing I said she probably didn't even read it, referring to the 1689 Unconditional Confession. Oh, I read it. Okay, well, I know a lot of people who've read the 1689.
That doesn't mean that they actually understood it or believed it, and she misses the point that her complete lack of understanding of the covenant and the fact that the 1689 is a covenantal confession, and where she thought that that was an area of disagreement, demonstrates she still has no idea what she's talking about.
And you see, there are Roman Catholics who are observing this situation who know that what I'm saying is true. There are times that Mrs. Bonds has appeared on, like I said, Catholic Answers, and it was sad.
When the apologetics questions start, she could not answer them. See, people assumed, and this was, again, the fault of Catholic Answers and the people promoting them, that her conversion was somehow relevant to apologetics, but it wasn't.
You see, we need to remember something. If Mrs. Bonds was this knowledgeable, well-trained individual, then the real question that comes up is, why is it that she converted without doing anything more than writing one anonymous email to me?
One. Anonymous. Now by God's grace, what I wrote in that email, and it's posted on my website, is what I would have said, what I hope I would have said, even if I had known it was her. I am thankful to this day, and I remember getting that email to this day.
I was in the midst of a very busy time, very difficult time. I was out of town, was having various sundry issues, and yet it's one of those supernatural events in my life. The Lord caught my attention.
It would have been so easy to say, I'm just too busy for this. Caught my attention. I gave a full response to that email. So the question becomes, if she was what she wants to claim she was, now why? One anonymous email.
Never contacted me, never called me, never sat down with me, nothing. I know why. It's fear. To this day she knows she cannot answer the questions I've asked her. My written letters and emails to her have been filled with utterly unanswered documentation that she passes on to other people.
She knows this. And the more sober Roman Catholic apologists know that on an apologetic level, her conversion is irrelevant because she doesn't know the issues. That doesn't stop the less scrupulous and deceptive and dishonest apologists from utilizing her.
She was contradicting herself again as well. She talked about when she first converted how she couldn't even watch my debates because I'm so angry. I've had a lot of people comment about that. That they've watched the debates with St. Genes or the debates with the Medetics, which would have been the debates that were available back then.
And they just go, what is she talking about? I don't know. She's not overly in touch with reality about things like that. She admitted she had read almost nothing of my books at all, especially on the subject of Roman Catholicism, and yet now she sort of needs an upgrade on her convert status.
All that changes. So who's really engaging in historical revisionism here? All of a sudden, she needs to say she was much more cognizant of these things. Well, if so, then why hasn't she ever produced any meaningful response that would demonstrate this?
Those are the questions. She claims that I do what I do. This was a fascinating paragraph. She claims that I do what I do simply because I wish to denigrate her and defend my family. Believe me, if I wanted to, in fact, that was the whole of my ministry.
If I wanted to denigrate Patti Bonds, I would have struck first. I knew about her conversion before she went public. I didn't. I gave her the opportunity to just, you know, if she had just wanted to become Roman Catholic and just live as a Roman Catholic, I never would have said a word about it.
But I knew that that's not what she wanted to do, and I knew that the people around her would never allow her to do that. But I didn't strike first. There was no preemptive strike. There are a lot of things that I could bring forth, some from just the past two and a half years, that would be highly illustrative of her instability.
But you see, I have a distinct disadvantage here. I have standards. Anyone familiar with what she has done over the past year and a half publicly on the Internet and television knows that she has no standards as to what she will say in public.
None at all. Everything's fair game. And so she has an advantage. I'm just not going to do that. But there are things that I could point out that would, they're obviously part of my thinking and my behavior, and that's what's so disgusting about Steve Ray and Art Sippo and these people.
They don't know. They would be highly offended if anyone ever treated them the way that they are treating me, but they don't know. They are willing to slander and libel all in the service of Mother Rome and do it with a smiling face, with his little Jerusalem Jones hat on and stuff like that.
I just need to remind Mrs. Bonds that to say that I've done what I've done in my ministry, that it has something to do with her, is a part of this professional victim mentality that she has truly imbibed.
She just, every bit of her life is defined by what she claims happened in the past. And you know, there's a lot of people that are stuck in that. I suppose there's a sense, maybe, that one thing that could come out of this that would be good would be people to see just how crippled she has become because she just lives in this realm of victimhood and everything is defined by that.
And there are so many people who've bought into that. It's one of the most debilitating aspects of our modern society, that you blame your parents, you blame the people that you grew up with, you blame your circumstances, you blame events from 150 years ago anymore as if, you know, I just could never be a success in life because of X, Y, and Z.
Thankfully, I've never bought into that. Everyone's parents are fallible. I think of myself as a parent and I think of each of my young people and I go, well, you know, I could have been there for them in that or I could have done this better.
I think every parent, hopefully every parent, every Christian parent anyway, sits back and thinks about these things. But, you know, I've never passed on to my kids this idea of a victim mentality. You are responsible for God for who you are.
You stand before God for the decisions you make. Blaming other people is just, it's pathetic and it shows a tremendous lack of maturity. To say that what I've done in my ministry is all because of her makes her the central person and I'm sorry, that's just, that's ridiculous.
I was fully engaged in dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and Roman Catholicism long before Mrs. Bonds decided to become Roman Catholic. And if she thinks that I have done sen-sen since engaging Islam has anything to do with her at all, that's just delusional.
That's the only way to put it. Aside from the brief times when despicable Roman Catholic apologists have thrown her into the limelight for their own purposes, and again I consider that abusive, I do not even give her rantings a second thought.
I have to monitor them simply so that I know what she's saying, but I don't give them a second thought. She has made it clear that the harm, damage, and destruction not only of my parents but of my own family is high on her priority list and so of course from her perspective she's helping.
So I do all I can to keep far, far away from her and to keep her away from my family for their own good because I believe that she is destructive in her behavior. So in conclusion, compare the two sides, compare the two sides.
One side has people sitting around chat channels going, how can we get a hold of people's families? Digging in and being willing to libel and slander people's parents and families and thinking that somehow conversion stories, emotionalism, is the mechanism of the promulgation of truth.
Compare that with the consistent type of response, and I certainly hope that I am an example of it, but look at others, look at other Reformed responses to Roman Catholicism in particular since we're comparing those two sides.
Look at the material that you would find written over the years in response to Roman Catholicism, not the jack chicks of the world. You know, I know Rome wants people to think that that's what anti-Catholicism is.
You know Steve Ray, the bigoted man that he is, cannot refer to anyone such as myself in any other way than as an anti-Catholic. He can't even break out of his own prejudice, his own bigotry, to recognize that that terminology is inaccurate, and it totally destroys his own credibility.
Anybody who has followed me, watch the Ehrman debate, watch the Crossan debate, watch the Islamic debates to identify me as an anti-Catholic, just as a demonstration of how little the man has any grasp of truth at all.
It's amazing that he can't see that, but he's blind to it. Deception will do that to you, it'll just utterly blind you. But look at the books that we've produced, the number of citations, the attempt to get to original documentation.
We talk about church history, we're citing early church documents, we're citing early church fathers. We're not just going on the basis of jargons or something like that. We've spent the time to try to be careful.
We're not infallible. We make mistakes, but we try, and when a mistake is made, it's admitted. Someone like Steve Ray will not even admit a mistake, because he seems to view himself really as being in the same vein as the infallibility of the Pope.
If I'm wrong about this, then maybe the papacy is wrong or something. I don't know what kind of mindset goes into that kind of thinking, but it is quite common. You don't find us digging into the families of Catholic apologists, utilizing gross slander.
And I do want to ask one other question. Where's Ben Douglas in all this? Ben Douglas is a nice young man, and he's actually had the temerity, the guts to speak up about some people. I think he's spoken out a little bit about Art Sippo, maybe about Dave Armstrong, I don't remember which one it was.
But I asked him recently, why aren't you saying anything about Steve Ray? I've never said anything about Steve Ray. Well maybe he's just not aware of what Steve Ray is willing to do to slander and libel people in the name of Rome.
Maybe now he will, I don't know. But where are all these people? You know, Patrick Madrid, he's given Art Sippo a voice on his web board for years. He has to have people like Patty running around through the web board, cleaning up after him, after Art, when he makes messes.
But he won't get rid of them. Because you see, I keep coming back to the same point. As long as it is in service of Mother Rome, sadly I think back to the time of the Inquisition and those Inquisitors who really believed that what they were doing was good for people's souls.
Yeah I'll turn that rack a little bit more because it's good for your soul. It may not be any racks right now, but the attitude's still there. The attitude's really still there, as long as it's good for Mother Rome.
Now the person who is looking for truth, is concerned about truth, should say something. Should say something that Catholic Answers will promote Steve Ray, and they'll use Steve Ray, and they won't talk about any of these things, they won't talk about his methodologies, they won't talk about the errors he makes, they sort of cover things over.
But they just keep putting them on. And Patrick Madrid puts up with Art Sippo, and why won't these folks just come clean? Well maybe it all boils down to, we have to maintain our unity because our biggest argument, Sola Scriptura, is it's a blueprint for anarchy.
Look at all those divisions out there. And if we admit that we have divisions amongst us too, then people might start realizing that most of our argumentation is really self-contradictory. Yeah, that's what you see with Rome.
And until Roman Catholic apologists start standing up and say, stop this foolishness. Patti Bonds is not relevant to the truth claims of Roman Catholicism or anybody else. Stop abusing her. Stop thinking this is relevant.
Let's get to the real issues. Well, until that happens, they've got no moral ground upon which to stand at all. Thanks for watching.
