(April 6, 2017 at 1:16 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:

(April 6, 2017 at 9:28 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: They only need to be in lockstep about things they're claim they are consistent on. If you say cellular biologists agree on X and X isn't settled at all, then you can't really say that agreeing on X is a characteristic of cellular biologists, can you? In fact, there are very few things 90% of Christians agree on, and that's fine, until you start saying things like 'true Christians do or believe X' and it knocks out a significant portion of people who are counted as Christians on the census. It's reasonable to question how representative that 'Christians do this' statement is.

Someone up thread said something to the effect that Christianity is the Bible. That isn't actually the case. Like every other religion, Christianity is the people its composed of. Christians determine what Christianity is, and if they have a big change of heart about something concerning their religion en masse, Christianity changes with them.

And here I think you are nit-picking. The only place I hear people talking about True Christian is AF. It's a kind of boogeyman you've invented around internecine debates over secondary doctrines. While it is true that some groups like Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses call themselves Christian, no one else outside their numbers accept them as such. If you look at the 3 main divisions - Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and mainline Protestants -  not one of these groups considers the other two non-Christian. And within Protestantism, the biggest divisions, it seems, are over things like infant- versus believer-baptism. I don't know any significant group that claims those on opposite sides of that debate are not Christians.

I grew up in a UCC congregation that was so small we had to share a minister with the local Methodists. Half of the year he or she preached in our building while the other half of the year he or she preached in the Methodist's building. We had one youth group and one Sunday school and they were both mixed. It was never a problem. There's barely any difference between the vast majority of denominations. You're making a mountain over a mole hill.

No you call it nit picking. We rightfully call it cherry picking. Nobody is inventing a boogieman here. 

"You are contradicting yourself" does not make us creating an emotional argument against your claim. It merely and really means "You are contradicting yourself", nothing more.

Nope sorry, now you want to claim the different sects don't point at each other and say the other are not interpreting it right? BULLSHIT. You got called out and you don't want to face that those conflicts and divisions DO exist between those camps.

My own biological brother when I first met him as adult grew up and never left his conservative evangelical baptist views. When he knew I was an atheist and told him I was ex Catholic his words were, "See there's your problem, they don't use the right version".  For you to lie and say all the competing sects agree and never have disagreements is flat out intellectually dishonest.

(April 6, 2017 at 12:59 pm)Harry Nevis Wrote:

(April 6, 2017 at 8:12 am)SteveII Wrote: And guess what, the apostles (the people he was talking to) were able to do those things . Read Acts.

Because it said so in a book?  Guess what...?

Well, if you are going to invent all these people, events, and conversations, at least the conspirators who wrote the NT had the decency to close the loop on this issue.

Utter bullshit to claim all the different sects agree. If that were the case you would not have some using the bible to condemn homosexuality while having others use it to justify giving rights to LGBT. 

I can tell you even outside my brother having lived in Jerry Falwell's city for 10 years, having seen the reaction of other religious Christians and having attended a Unitarian Church myself, NO there is no 100% perfect agreement between the sects. No complete agreement even under the same sects. I was Catholic and have seen plenty of times over the years hear a conservative Catholic fight with a liberal Catholic. Now if you want to claim those are the followers and not the leaders, please explain to me where the individual gets their ideas from? Who sells the individual one thing while another leader sells them something else?

Even the Pope himself has contradicted himself and pissed off his own church leaders by saying one thing about marriage to the west only to visit Asia and tell them the opposite. 

Don't hand me any bullshit that all the sub sects agree. You have conservative and liberals under every sub sect and the DONT agree as to how to interpret or follow all the different versions of the bible.

SteveII Wrote:Regarding your last sentence, do you have any examples of that?

Acceptance of divorce has done a 180 among the majority of American Christians in my lifetime.

A quarter of the US population is Evangelical Protestant, and that Catholics (and Orthodox) aren't actually Christians is a common belief among those 80 or so million people. It was certainly what I was raised to believe. Distinguishing mainline Protestants as believing Catholics (and Orthodox) are Christians is basically saying Protestants believe Catholics (and Orthodox) are Christians except for the tens of millions who don't.

(April 6, 2017 at 1:51 pm)SteveII Wrote:

(April 6, 2017 at 12:59 pm)Harry Nevis Wrote: Because it said so in a book?  Guess what...?

Well, if you are going to invent all these people, events, and conversations, at least the conspirators who wrote the NT had the decency to close the loop on this issue.

Funny how people of other religions fell for it but you didn't. That was a bullshit dodge still amounting to "I am right and everyone else is wrong".

Yes, we do think Jesus was invented after the fact. Yes we do know babies don't have magic powers or rise from the dead. Just like you accept there is no elephant god with multiple arms. 

There is no "conspiracy". There were simply humans who either didn't know better, or didn't care and simply took part in mass marketing. That is how all religions start. In  antiquity it was tribal and political both in polytheism and monotheism. Some truly believed the crap they were peddling, others saw it as an opportunity to be part of a new movement and gain attention. 

There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, but if you really want to believe that, you will end up selling the idea as soon as it is sold to you. But at the same time you can be conned by someone who is doing just that, conning you to get attention. In all of religious history in our species history, those falsehoods are nether all con or all genuine, but a combo of both mostly due to the buyers selling it to the youth and in turn competing for social attention.

Now please don't accuse me of singling Christianity out. The Jamaica Rasta religion is a spin off of a mix of African Jewish/Catholic motifs. The Jews are a spin off of Canaanite polytheism. Buddhism is a spin off of older Hinduism. Islam is simply the third version of the God of Abraham.

(April 6, 2017 at 3:03 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: A quarter of the US population is Evangelical Protestant, and that Catholics (and Orthodox) aren't actually Christians is a common belief among those 80 or so million people. It was certainly what I was raised to believe. Distinguishing mainline Protestants as believing Catholics (and Orthodox) are Christians is basically saying Protestants believe Catholics (and Orthodox) are Christians except for the tens of millions who don't.

I agree, many protestants do not think that Catholics are Christians.  I also think that tens of millions of people who claim to be protestant Christians are not either. But I think it comes back to my distinction earlier between nominal Christians and practicing NT Christians.