Quote:
One of my problems with your faith is that you claim that you feel some personal revelation that God exists, which I think is weird, but that's beside the point, and that you have this suppsedly personal relationship with him, but then you believe everything that everyone else has written. You're not just taking God on faith, you're taking on faith that every piece of literature written about it is also accurate, even when you know that the people involved were not divinely inspired. I can understand the first part, sort of, but I cannot begin to understand the second.
I don't believe that every piece of literature written about God is accurate, only those pieces canonized in the Bible. It was not a simple process and there was specific criteria by which the books were chosen. There is plenty of material available on how the canonization process took place, if you are interested. Safe to say, there were a lot of people with a lot of different motives, but ultimately I (and other Christians like me) believe that God worked in this process to give us His inspired Word. And while the authors themselves were fallable, we believe that God worked through those individuals to give us the Bible so that we may know Him better.

I believe the heart of your question is that if I have a personal relationship with God, why do I need further information beyond my personal experience? The answer is that I am a sinful human whose interpretation of experience is very fallable. It is not safe to rely on experience alone, as experience is more easily twisted than scripture to mean whatever we want it to mean. And not all experiences are from God, either. It is true that the scripture can be twisted, but it is still much more objective than the subjective experiences of a believer. Thus, anything I experience I must test against scripture, which I believe is God's absolute rule of faith to guide me. Of course, my interpretation of scripture is equally fallable, but that is why there is a community of believers to help guide one another in doctrine and belief.

One of the HUGE differences between Catholics and Protestants is that Protestents believe that scripture is the absolute rule of faith by which everything must be tested while Catholics believe that the scripture and church are equal. This what was know as the "formal cause" of the reformation (the "material cause" being the issue of salvation by faith alone). The Protestant view is that both humans and the church itself are corruptable, but that the Bible is not.
_________________________
-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.