I totally get your point, but I think there is validity in calling into question your right to identify as a member of a given religion when you go directly against your religion’s teachings.
If someone claims to be “a Christian,” they are. There is no other qualification. Whether such a person adheres more or less to common Christian principles is a separate issue, let alone that there are so many splinter groups of “Christians” that the phrase “common Christian principles” barely has any meaning anyway.
That’s not correct in any way. The word “Christian” has a specific definition. If someone claims they’re a “Christian” but don’t believe in Jesus, then they’re not a Christian. They can’t be. If someone claims to be a “Catholic” but doesn’t “accept” Pope Francis as the legitimate Pope, they’re not a Catholic. I can claim to be a musician but, if I can’t play any instruments, I’m not.
You can play any instrument you like. Whether you’re “good at it” is a separate issue.
If someone claims they’re a “Christian” but don’t believe in Jesus, then they’re not a Christian.
That’s fair. It still hinges on a belief claim only. Based on a person’s other actions, you can doubt that claim, but the singular authority for what a person actually believes is what that person claims to believe.
If someone claims to be a “Catholic” but doesn’t “accept” Pope Francis as the legitimate Pope, they’re not a Catholic.
That’s not true. There have been quite a number of schisms in the catholic church which resulted in a split on who people thought was the pope. The guy who doesn’t come out on top in that situation is called an antipope. Sometimes it was difficult to decide in history which person was the pope and which was antipope. There have been about 40 of them with the last being in the 15th century.
The Palmarian Church is a catholic splinter group that has an antipope.
That’s not correct in any way. The word “Christian” has a specific definition.
Webster isn’t any more of a dictator of truth than anyone else. There’s a reason why Socrates spent a lot of time debating definitions with people. They’re hard to actually get right.
If someone claims they’re a “Christian” but don’t believe in Jesus, then they’re not a Christian. They can’t be.
But what if they also claim to believe in Jesus? How do you measure or test belief? How do you know what’s in the mind or soul of a person?
If someone claims to be a “Catholic” but doesn’t “accept” Pope Francis as the legitimate Pope, they’re not a Catholic.
What if they attend Catholic mass? Hell, what if they’re a member of the priesthood?
I can claim to be a musician but, if I can’t play any instruments, I’m not.
Even this is a bad argument. Aren’t singers musicians? How about rappers?
All of this debate is really over whether or not something is no longer a thing if they’re not a high quality version of that thing. I think it’s a fairly shallow debate because a wobbly stool is still a stool. A shitty singer is still a musician. A broken chair is still a chair, and similarly just because someone’s a bad Christian doesn’t mean they’re not a Christian.
See it’s pretty easy to square the “I’m a lamp” circle, though. What do you mean by “I’m a lamp”? You could mean basically anything, even things you don’t mean it to mean, I could just come up with random shit it could mean and I’d be no less wrong. In a vacuum, much like identifying as a christian, it’s a pretty meaningless claim, the only commonality of the claim as it exists is that you decided to use that specific word. You know, much like a christian.
Are you a lamp cos you get turned on when I twist your switch?
Then why are things like excommunication (where you get kicked out of the religion for going directly against beliefs) a thing?
Excommunicated Catholics can still be Christians. The term means someone who believes in Christ, and everything else is negotiable. No one Christian or sect can decide what Christianity is for everyone else.
I understand your point and generally agree, with an aside: The actual Nazis weren’t socialists, just because they added that to their faction’s official title.
It’s weird to me that you agree and yet have provided an excellent example disproving the entire point.
Jesus talked very little about LGBT and a lot more about not forcing your beliefs onto other and not being a dick to people simply because they do things differently from you.
Not to mention that their stance on God hating gays is literal blasphemy, because again, there isn’t much said about being gay by Jesus
Most things Christians believe have absolutely zero to do with Jesus. It’s a big book.
Jesus as far as I know didn’t address homosexuality at all in the gospels.
Yet there’s the OT to contend with. You can find passages that, at least in English translations, condemn homosexual acts. Find a concordance and search for homosexuality and Bob’s your uncle. And there are quite a few “sexual morality” statements in the NT. (Does that include homosexuality? No idea).
And there’s also the rest of the NT to deal with. Believers are commanded to proselytize. And not just once or twice. That isn’t forcing your beliefs on others but it is definitely not being quiet and keeping to yourself either.
There are also many passages in OT and NT that condemn those who “do things differently”. Christianity is not necessarily a “live and let live religion” looking at those passages. It is often more of a “my way or the highway (to hell…)” kind of thing per most common denominations (but not all).
You may think you have an accurate interpretation but there are many others who say the same thing about their own unique interpretations that differ from yours in various ways.
To add on, the parable of The Good Samaritan also highlights his opinions on how Christians should treat people that are of a different, “reviled” culture than their own (Samaria in the story) by defining who a “neighbor” is and emphasis on loving your neighbor as yourself.
From the modern viewpoint of secularists, sure it is. But if we take the values or Christianity on face value, they don’t say that.
The fact that so many Christians are hateful towards LGBT+ does present a difficult bind though: is true Christianity the writ values, or the modern zeitgeist? The pope himself ran into this very question recently when he started firing Catholic priests for not towing the progressive line that he has drawn. Who is right, the pope or his flock?
(Also, see the great answer that someone gave on No True Scotsman in this same comment tree)
Except what are the “real” teachings? How do you know? Who is the authority? Where is the solid evidence. The god of the Bible is silent on the matter of our interpretations over the centuries (if he even exists).
The Bible seems to condemn homosexuality in a few places and condemns “sexual immorality”. But interpretations of these passages and how they relate to many other passages are numerous, each person claiming to have it all figured out. Some think the OT doesn’t count anymore. Some think it still does but Jesus is essentially a get out of jail free card, some think Jesus is all about love, some define love to include various levels punishment, some believe God creates pre-damned people. Some think homosexuality is fine but the passages refer to sexual abuse. So we come back to the question: which interpretation is “correct”?
These books are translated from content written millennia ago. The gospels were written a generation after Jesus and we don’t have the sources. The oldest version of books in the OT dates centuries after the originals. Thus, evidence is weak that the originals said the same thing as the current version. We have insufficient evidence for divine inspiration in the writing, copying or translating of said materials.
When evidence is lacking then the only alternative, belief (faith) provides a very unreliable source of information.
Yes there’s no reliable manual, but generally people who were actually educated in the text mean following what has been written about Jesus: loving everyone independently of identity, forgiving people who offend you, helping the poor and the weak, refusing violence, doing funny rituals with fermented grape juice etc.
I should have mentioned I was a Christian for 40 years and did quite a fair bit of bible study so I’m coming at this as a former “insider”.
Certainly the things you list are among the main tenets that I suppose many Christians follow. Those were the main things I prioritized.
But in those decades I was exposed to a number of different schools of thought and I observed that the messages believers prioritized were not universal.
There is no such thing as a religion having objective “teachings.”
It’s always been subjective.
Normal people are Jews and Muslims, and extremists like the genocidal Israeli colonizers, and the similarly genocidal Wahhabist/Salafi terrorists are still Jews and Muslims.
There is no “true” understanding of these religions.
There is no such thing as a religion having objective “teachings.”
So what is the Bible? Or the Qur’an?
The Bible is an assembled collection of curated religious stories and traditions. I can’t speak to the history of all of it but the first books of the OT were drawn from religious stories and traditions of north and south Judah and adapted to create religious (and thus political) unity by the king at the time in the face of the threat of rival, neighboring countries. Of the many gods worshipped at the time the OT books essentially retcon two of them to be one god, denounce polytheism, and create a mythical historical narrative of the country’s population. Mythical because archaeological evidence contradicts a great deal of the stories.
The NT is a collection of Epistles, gospels, etc., chosen from a large pool of similar sorts of writings and assembled into what we have today. I don’t know a great deal about what drove those selections and only vaguely know that some of the other writings were quite different theologically.
