At that stage I'll think I'll read the Gospel from start to finish with a pair of fresh eyes and an honest intention.  I still think Jesus was real enough and that the Gospels are a great code for living your life.  There are pearls of Wisdom in the Gospel that are either Divinely inspired or way about any morality I could come up with...
Frankly for the last 20 years I've had serious reservations about what has been taken from the Gospels and leveraged and what has been ignored and left out.  Christianity seems to have been heavily influenced by the emperor Constatine who as far as I understand it wasn't even a converted Christian until his deathbed.

For example, Jesus seems to make multiple statement that poverty is good and holy and that Christians should seek to have just enough and then give the rest to the poor.  Give your coat to a man who needs it and trust in providence.

Hardly any Christians do this however, myself included and the Church has been pretty quiet on the subject for the last 1500 years, and seems to mostly have sided with the Lords and Nobles and Kings, who were little more than the local warlords and mafia strongmen...

Conversely I've got friends who are evangelical Christian types, Baptists and Methodists who are very pleasant people to have around.  They have good sized families, their children love them, they are always willing to come over and help you paint your house, weed the garden etc.  Some of them are models of virtue.  This leads me to believe that their lives on earth must be pleasing to God...

I certainly DO have a problem with the idea that 90%+ of people who reach the age of reason are damned to Hell for all eternity.  God designed the system.  He new what humans were before the fall and understood what their nature would be like after the fall.  Any God who creates intelligent beings without asking them first and then damns most of them to hell is to my way of thinking an evil monster.

Reminds me of Desmond Tutu: "I'd rather go to hell than worship a homophobic God"

There is no question this post is filled with material heresy.

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I still think Jesus was real enough and that the Gospels are a great code for living your life.  There are pearls of Wisdom in the Gospel that are either Divinely inspired or way about any morality I could come up with...

Sounds like rationalism of the Jeffersonian variety.

Our Lord was no mere moral philosopher. I don't accept "pearls of wisdom" from a man who also claims for Himself divine Sonship, co-equality with God, the authority to condemn humanity to hell, eating of His Flesh and Blood in order to have life, giving of His own life in propitiation for all sin... unless I truly and firmly believed all of those claims. If I did not, those "pearls of wisdom"  wouldn't be worth the paper they're printed on.

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Christianity seems to have been heavily influenced by the emperor Constatine who as far as I understand it wasn't even a converted Christian until his deathbed.
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First, let's get this fallacy out of the way: There is no such entity as "Christianity." There is the Catholic Church, there are heretics, there are schismatics, and that's it. They don't all coalesce to form some amorphous entity known as "Christianity." No serious Catholic I've ever met refers to "Christianity" in this way - it is a term that is pregnant with indifferentism.

Second, the "influence of Constantine" canard sounds like it was ripped from the pages of a Chick tract. Constantine issued an edict of toleration of Christians. He did not make Catholicism the state religion. He seemed largely indifferent to the Faith, and after the Nicene Council, he sympathized with the Arian heretics, even receiving his delayed baptism at the hands of an Arian. He is not a canonized saint in the Catholic Church, though he is in the eastern schismatic churches. If he has had any "influence" on any particular group, it is on the damnable tradition of Caesaropapism in the schismatic east.

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For example, Jesus seems to make multiple statement that poverty is good and holy and that Christians should seek to have just enough and then give the rest to the poor.  Give your coat to a man who needs it and trust in providence.

Hardly any Christians do this however, myself included and the Church has been pretty quiet on the subject for the last 1500 years, and seems to mostly have sided with the Lords and Nobles and Kings

I guess he's never heard of St Francis of Assisi.

This gets to the heart of the matter. I remember reading a thread on FE back when I lurked there in which traditional Catholic men were bashed in the most deplorable, uncatholic, worldly, materialistic manner. Chief among this shameful pack was ggreg, whose scorn and contempt for the poor, and whose boastful, idolatrous praise for the usurious accuмulation of filthy lucre was worthy of Shylock himself.

The Church has respected legitimate secular authority since its very inception, so I fail to see what scandal is to be found in "siding with lords and nobles and kings." The Church has also consistently preached the virtues of temperance, self-mortification, charity, the need for those who have more to give more... and has produced numerous saints who embraced holy poverty. This is plain to anyone with a working knowledge of Church history, and I don't believe ggreg has really "struggled" with this for 20 years.

I do however, suspect he has been stung by a pricked conscience. I have no idea how charitable (or not) ggreg is with his apparently fast financial resources, but I do know his idolatrous adoration of it is plainly un-Catholic. He knows it is in conflict with the tenets of the faith, but he would rather flirt with open heresy than to act on what his conscience demands of him and free himself from his Judaic adoration of Mammon. He is like the wealthy young man who, when faced with a difficult demand by Our Lord, "went away sad."

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Conversely I've got friends who are evangelical Christian types, Baptists and Methodists who are very pleasant people to have around.

There's a red flag for you.

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They have good sized families, their children love them, they are always willing to come over and help you paint your house, weed the garden etc.  Some of them are models of virtue.  This leads me to believe that their lives on earth must be pleasing to God...

That judgement is for God to make, not us. Good works without faith are dead... Ggreg's Protestant pals would be the first to tell him that. And as a Catholic he should know a Protestant's good works are works without faith. He should be working overtime to evangelize to them, not throwing his hands up in indifferent despair because they're "such nice people."

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I certainly DO have a problem with the idea that 90%+ of people who reach the age of reason are damned to Hell for all eternity.  God designed the system.  He new what humans were before the fall and understood what their nature would be like after the fall.  Any God who creates intelligent beings without asking them first and then damns most of them to hell is to my way of thinking an evil monster.[/b]

The Problem of Evil is Catholic Apologetics 101. How a man can have been a Catholic - a "traditional" Catholic no less - for decades and still be struggling with the Problem of Evil is beyond me. I smell disingenuousness here. I think it is yet another manifestation of a stung conscience being silenced with proud obstinacy.

Pray, fast, and give as much of your surplus money as you possible can to good Catholic charities. That's my advice.

I can say I hope ggreg, or any Catholic, doesn't feel the way described in the quoted post.

I trust by "feel" you mean "think" or "believe."

Sorry to single you out, but that's a modern habit of language that we would do well to break.

I hope ggreg will explain the post he made in 2011.

To stay steadfast in the faith is increasingly difficult today but the good Lord gives enough grace. I also find it frustrating to see so many Catholics espouse all these quirkly ideas about the faith when all they would need to do is open up a good book about the Faith.

Meh.  I'd say that it's important to realize the difference between the people and their actions within the Church vs what the Church actually teaches, as verified by sacred Scriptures.  

Protestants have a few strengths that Catholics lack, such as Biblican knowledge and charity towards their neighbors.  Plus, they don't seem to give up and give in to liberalism.  

Now, all they have to do is convert to the Church.

Nothing was taken out from the Gospels. What appalling liberalism at best. St. Irenaeus in the second century tells us who wrote our Gospels, when and where and to whom they wrote, having himself received it by Tradition going back to the Apostles themselves when they established the Churches throughout the world. The Gospels were penned by Apostles, like St. Matthew and St. John or disciples of Apostles, as St. Mark and St. Luke. They are essentially eyewitness accounts, demonstrably and historically, even besides being inspired and inerrant, as the Church was taught by Christ and His Apostles from whom she received them. Constantine did not affect the Gospels, he was a Christian for some time, he was baptized late because of a misunderstanding some had early on, to gain the powerful effects of this sacrament late in life. Saints like Francis of Assisi and Vincent de Paul have given and done far more for the poor both in their lives and through their orders than whole countries have done. Even today, with all the catastrophe within the Church, Christian charities, hospitals and social services perform countless works of mercy in the world. God gives all men sufficient grace to be saved, those who reject it perish through their own fault. Scripture nor Tradition nor the Church says 90% of people are going to hell, but all who go there assuredly go through their own fault.

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Meh.  I'd say that it's important to realize the difference between the people and their actions within the Church vs what the Church actually teaches, as verified by sacred Scriptures.  

Protestants have a few strengths that Catholics lack, such as Biblican knowledge and charity towards their neighbors.  Plus, they don't seem to give up and give in to liberalism.  

Now, all they have to do is convert to the Church.

Protestants haven't given in to liberalism? Most Protestant sects have openly pro-ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ policies, including the Lutherans and Anglicans. All protestant sects embrace contraception and divorce/remarriage. They are liberals.

Not true. I know many who refuse to allow those remarried to become members of their congregation. They do not embrace contraception either.