(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.
