They arbitrarily pick which councils they want to consider authoritative.

You don't believe in 2,99 gods, and I don't believe in just one more.

Hey, look, there's this thing you regard is real, and this thing you regard is fake,

and therefore it's arbitrary for you to believe one of them is real and one of them is fake.

No, it could be arbitrary, but it's not necessarily. So let's unpack that

argument. Welcome back to James Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire. And I want to answer a kind of argument

that I hear used to argue against Catholicism, to argue against church councils and the Pope,

to argue against Christianity itself, to argue against the Bible, to argue against even the existence of God.

And you'll hear this argument in different forms, sometimes by Protestants, sometimes by non-Christian,

sometimes by atheists. And you might not recognize it as the same argument. So I'm going to give

some examples of it from everyone from Ryan at Needgod.net to Ricky Jervase

and show how it's a similar kind of argument being used. I'm calling it the counterfeit argument.

It goes a little bit like this. You believe there is a true thing. There's a church council.

There's a pope. There's a book of the Bible.

There's a religion.

There's a God.

But look, here's something false that also claims to be that thing.

So therefore, you're being arbitrary and believing in one and not the other.

And therefore, we should reasonably reject both of them.

Now, that might sound like a silly argument.

Let me give you some examples of people using this argument in the wild, as it were.

Starting, as I said, with Ryan from Need God, where he argues is one of his ten reasons to reject

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