(January 20, 2012 at 4:52 am)riverthought Wrote: 1. Would you please define for me what you understand a Christian to be?
2. Would you please tell me your understanding of how one becomes a Christian?
1. The only thing Christians have in common is that they all believe various versions of unsupported tales of a Jewish troublemaker called Jesus (a very common name back then) who either was or was not executed for his crimes. Quite a lot of them believe that he was the son of God but that is by no means a universal belief amongst Christians - although the uneducated ones think that it is.
2. That is not as simple a question as it first appears. There are hundreds of flavours of Christian, few of which go well together. Each flavour thinks they understand God better than all the rest. To confuse matters further, we have the new-age Christians who think that they have a 'personal relationship with God'' but that is just so that they can justify disagreeing with every other human.
The prime teaching of Jesus, concentrated in the 'Sermon on the mount' was to love one another, to treat them as you would wish to be treated and to turn the other cheek is someone attacks you. Rather than follow that prime teaching, many of those devout Christians flavours were slaughtered by other devout Christians flavours because simply they believed something slightly different.
Mainstream Christianity got kick started by Constantine when he ordered the bible to be written at the first synod at Nicea. The majority of current Christians will claim that the bible is at the heart of their faith and if you do not accept the bible as the inspired word of God (most accept there are errors in it though) and that God the father, son and holy Ghost are Consubstantial - then you are not a Christian. However, that is not accepted by plenty of other flavours with more aquired testes such as Arians, Cathars, Jehovah's Witnesses and various other non-trinitarian flavours.
So, if you want to become a Christian, just say that you are one, you can make up the rest as you go along and argue about it with everyone in the world if you come up with enough strange ideas. Does that answer your question?
