(January 12, 2015 at 11:47 am)Drich Wrote: Just an open ended question.The Bible is sufficiently open to interpretation that it seems impossible to determine just what the rules are and who is actually practicing them properly. So I just take the claims at face value. I am here, in part, because I am curious about what people believe and why they believe it. I am not concerned with trying to determine who is or is not an actual Christian. That strikes me as a monumental waste of my time. So I accept the claim from the self-professed Christian that he is what he says he is, and am interested in seeing how he explains his beliefs and point-of-view.
What's with blurring the lines between those who claim Christianity and those who actually practice it?
If the lines are blurred, I think that is due to the many interpretations --on both the organizational and personal level-- of just what Christianity means and how a true follower is determined. It is neither my fault nor my problem that so many people lay claim to the label and to the authority to apply or remove the label from others. That's up to the claimants to deal with, if they consider it an issue.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
