[ziggytrix]

19 centuries give you plenty of time to accumulate stuff.

Not if you practice what you preach. Jesus commanded the rich to give up their riches. The Catholic Church instead accumulates wealth.

Also we'd have little knowledge of Classical art, since the Church was the only significant body that sought to preserve ancient works. The fruits of these labors are available to everyone who wishes to see them, regardless of faith.

That's wonderful, it really is. But the pupose of the Catholic Church is not to preserve art, and so again I say they are not practicing what they preach.

It's the exact same logic as asking a friend to pray for you when facing trouble.

Assuming the friend is dead, and you went to a medium to ask him to pray for you, then sure.

Besides, we wrote the New Testament, we were here first, so interpretting the message of the Bible into our protocol is our prerogative.

That's a rather arrogant statement. It seems to imply that the Catholic Church existed before someone thought to distinguish between various interpretaions of the Gospel. Certainly the Apostles wrote the New Testament, not the Catholics who came 300 years later.

So many Christian denominations claim to be the first this or that, but few do it like the Catholics. Truly the first church was not the Catholic Church, but merely many Christian churches. The very act of naming it "Universal" indicates an attempt to unify personal spiritualism under clerical dogma.