There's a messageboard I'm active on where critical topics are debated vigorously, often venomously.  Topics such as whether or not it is appropriate to include inserts of your wedding registry in your wedding invitation (I'm opposed) and whether or not Joey McIntyre is indeed the hawtest NKOTB 4+eva (I'm ambivalent).  But occasionally there is a topic that really stirs the pot and recently it was about Catholicism.  Specifically, one poster was polling the Catholics among us about being, essentially, "cafeteria Catholics."  That is, picking and choosing which tenets of the faith to call their own, and which to disclaim.  The debate spiraled round and round and up and down and left no abortion rights issue unexamined, no matter of transubstantiation unturned.  When all the dust settled, nothing really became that much more manifest, other than the fact that people believe what they believe. And that's fine with me.  Only, it's tempting, it's oh so tempting for this Catholic-born and raised and educated turned Adventist to want to stick her neck out for these debates.  To expose the fallacies, to really pound the proverbial gavel about what really is truthful, what really is honorable, and do you really think at the end of the day being a "good" person is the sum total of those piddley things alone?

But then I am reminded.  Isaiah 64:6.  All our righteous acts are as filthy rags.  That's right.  Our righteousness is as the snot rags all waddled up in your pocket.  Who are any of us to judge, who are any of us, Catholic, Adventist, Jew, Buddhist, heck, even Jihadist to think we are any better, that our sins are not any more scarlet in God's eyes, that we are not all hypocrits, wholly in need of God's goodness alone.

I read something awhile back about the trump card of trump cards and I think it captures so well this humbling concept of *truly* being righteous, achieving a righteousness fit for eternity.  Ironically, it is written about something that I don't necessarily believe in, that is, the quiverfull movement, but it is interesting nonetheless.