(November 13, 2017 at 1:23 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote:(November 13, 2017 at 12:58 pm)possibletarian Wrote: There have been wars fought over these 'nuances' ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarian_...Christians
You think believing in a 6,000 to 10,000 year old earth and an earth billions of years old in which humans have been around for the tiniest part of that history a small nuance ? One deals with actual original sin, the other uses it as a allegory.
Or That some Christians believe that we don't have free will is a small nuance?, almost all the arguments on here where god's love is called to question relies on free will, while other Christians dispose of the idea all together. Then you get full preterism that denies Jesus will return, and that the resurrection will be physical, on a physical earth. Or pre-tribulationist perhaps who have very different views on the second coming.
Even then you are still limiting it to the thousands of religions that use the bible as their source that you call Christian, what about those that still believe in Jesus and use the bible but generally would not be called Christians by the mainstream. ?
And that's just believers !! Bring in non believers who have no obligation to believe the bible at all and it becomes not subjective, but downright unbelievable.
Yes, people fight over small differences. Always have, always will.
I addressed the fact that there are fringe groups and exceptions, and was careful to use words like "almost", mostly", rather than absolutes. Taking Genesis as literal vs allegory is a small difference (so small that the Church actually allows a belief in either interpretation), because the underlying belief, the important part, is the same - that God is the Father of creation, that human beings have a tendency to sin. I've never met or ever even heard of a Christian denomination who doesn't believe in free will, but the fact that they may exist doesn't negate my point.
Um no, if religious differences were that small our species would not have the deep divisions, even under the same umbrella labels we do.
The problem is even with one label and it's competing sub sects, OF ANY GIVEN UMBRELLA LABEL, humans get stuck on those details instead of accepting that our morality isn't in a old book, but in our evolution.
Taking Genesis literally WAS the norm in antiquity, just as much to them real and literal the Ancient Egyptians believed in Ra and as literal as the Greeks believed in Zeus.
You not wanting to take parts of the bible literally now is a result of humans cherry picking. Instead maybe you need to consider the humans who wrote that BACK THEN literally believed the magic they were writing because all of antiquity both polytheism and monotheism were gap filling with wishful fantasy BACK THEN, because nobody knew any better.
To call the divisions minor is bologna. Even in the west, even today. To say Judge Roy Moore and Barack Obama have "minor differences believing in the same Christian God is patently absurd.
They have the same core heros sure, but not the same interpretations which there is a huge gap.
There ARE individuals that still believe in a 6 day earth, and even outside America the less educated that country is the more literally they take that holy book.