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Originally Posted by kerry
Yes, exactly. Instead of setting up some method of exclusion, I think that people who say they are Christians should be taken at their word.
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This criteria is stupid. One could believe that Jesus was a 50ft tall spider in Siberia and yet be categorized as a Christian if they simply claimed to be such.
Do you not see the problem?
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The fact that they don't meet your standard or some council's standard or that they choose to ignore, add or interpret an ancient text in a way that gets your shorts in a knot, is not a reason to say they are not Christians.
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Would you apply the same standards to any term?
Muslims? Pacifists? Jews?
Anybody who claims they are simply are?
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Christianity always has been a diverse and multi-faceted phenomena and to try to reduce it to what some small group thinks is ideologically correct (even if that group consists of a single person--St Paul) is a failure to understand the nature of human religious traditions.
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I agree Christianity has always been mulit-faceted, but it's always been monotheistic and Trinitarian. There are some things which preclude you from being a Christian if you reject them. Otherwise the word is meaningless.
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It's also true that there are lots of Christians who find existential satisfaction in conforming themselves to 'orthodoxy'. They like creating sharp ideological limits and then seeing how they can fix their own ideas within those limits. You're one of those kinds of persons. Had you lived in the time of Jesus, you never would have been a Christian, instead you'd have been a Pharisee unless you had a seizure and fell off your horse.
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Since Pharisees were only Jews... I don't think so.
Bad analogy poor chap.
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My view has nothing to do with secular/sacred. There are tons of Christian believers who view Christian history the way I do.
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And they would be just as misinformed and confused as you are. Appeal to population is a fallacy btw.