(April 19, 2012 at 1:36 am)Drich Wrote: [quote='Christian' pid='274718' dateline='1334809098']
Simple answer Drich. Its all for money. When you feel one denomination is not profitable, jump ship to another. That is why I left my Church and now non-denominations and the true son of Christ. You don't need a group of people to worship Lord. It can be done alone, in the confines of our own house.
Worshiping God from your house is not excluded in biblical Christianity. As we are told where ever two or more gather together "there I am as well." Just remember not to forsake the assembling of ourselves one to another.
Drich, if you are using Matthew 18:20 to validate your claim that worship of God in ones owns home is supported by Christian Scripture, then you have not made your case.
Look around any informal religious argument and you will find zealots that will defend any attacks against their book by claiming that the verse was taken out of context or that the verse is taken too litterally and does not represent "true Christianity" (whatever that means), but those same zealots have no problem supporting their own views with cherry-picked verses.
If you have read the chapter with any bit of neutrality and skepticism, you would see that "wherever two or more are gathered 'I am there'" was meant to justify any church authority to exile or banish heretics or heathens (cf. Mat 18:15-20). If anything you only shown that an accuser needs more than 1 witness, which is nothing new or extraordinary. This is only one example of misinterpretation, but it is ample to show to why so many self-proclaimed speakers of god claim what they say is just and right.
Why are there vast amounts of denominations? I would argue that it is because of secularism that we have this phenomena of an overwhelmingly vast religious pluralism within one religious umbrella. Denominations just have the freedom to express their own beliefs. 1 Cor 1:12 illustrates that early on there were factions within the churches. Heck, there was division even before Jesus allegedly picked up the cross. We have Paul vs Peter, Paul vs James and a plethora of other individuals, but in a larger scale, the first century for Christianity was a tug-of-war for religious-political power, the Jewish Christians vs Gnosticism vs proto-orthodoxy (they won by the way).
One question I have been asked, "if there was many different groups in early Christianity, why is there only one unified book"? The answer is because the proto-orthodox burned the opposing books, persecuted the heretics in order to stay in power and kept the masses in the dark. The proto-orthodox eventually became more commonly known as the Catholic church. Also, Christian scripture is also not very unified but thats a different story.
