I don’t want you to think I’m ignoring you or that you’ve somehow asked me a question that I’m too stupid to answer. I went back to church. I still go to church. I enjoy it, I get something spiritual from it. Beyond that you are owed no explanation.
[bolding mine]
My point was that there is no “the group.” The word Christianity is a label that is applied to one third of the world’s population based on a number of widely disparate beliefs about an itenerant preacher in First Century Palestine. Many individual groups share a number of similar, (occasionally identical), beliefs about that person, but there is no monolithic system that encompasses all those beliefs. There are smaller groups under that label that even deny that other groups are accurately identified by that label. (See the numbers of groups that say that Mormons and even Catholics are not Christians.)
When you introduced the “monkey sphere” comparison, you also changed the context from association to action. One may care about any number of issues, people, or events without actually considering oneself to be associated with them.
No. I initially responded to your question (that I found a bit confusing as it appears to me to be meaningless) by trying to set my response in a context. You then proceeeded to challenge each of my posts by ignoring the ultimate point of my initial response. I have not been trying to engage in argumentation; you are the one who asked a question and then challenged each answer. I have simply been trying to answer your question, using an expanding set of rhetorical devices as you persistently refuse to accept the answer I first gave which has not changed:
But there is no “the group” there. The fact that any odd person of any particular belief can stand up and claim that they are speaking for “the group” when the most casual survey of all the disparate sub-groups that are identified by any given label are clearly in opposition to much (even most) of what that individual says should be a pretty clear indicator to any outside observer that “the group” does not exist as some actual entity.
No, I suspect that you have not. I have on several occasions pointed out that claims regarding explicit teachings are not supported by an actual reading of the genuine published statements by one body or another, (usually the RCC), but I rarely wander into the areas of interpretation and when I do it is to point out that a specific group of limited and identifiable boundaries has expressed a different official interpretation than the one provided. There are Christians who accept the scientific description of the evolutionary process and there are Christians who deny that (some variation of) evolution has even ever occurred. There is no “Christian” view of evolution and it is silly to think that (given that different Christians at different times could not even agree on whether Jesus was God or human, or, more recently, real) there could be a single “Christian” view of evolution.
No one gets a free pass. I simply recognize that slapping a label on every person with some (often conflicting) views of Jesus does not magically turn all the people so labeled into a group beyond the need to distinguish them from people who are more likely to look to Mohammed or Buddha for spiritual inspiration.
I have not denigratated anyone besides Cameron and you have misread my statement:
My point was that your question assumes that there is a “group” labeled Christians and there is another (apparently large) “group” of non-Christians who will only learn about Christianity from TV. My response is that in the markets where Nightline appears, the audience is either already Christian (so they already know that Christianity is not a monolithic group) or they live in a nation that is dominated by a wide variety of separate groups bearing the label “Christian” and they should be aware that Christianity is not a single monolith.
I watched the entire debate and I was horribly underwhelmed. I thought both parties came off badly, to be honest. Kirk and Comfort were the better presenters (Kelly and Brian seemed nervous and rushed), however not only were Kirk and Comfort’s arguments utterly awful, Comfort’s hadn’t changed since his debate with Ron Barrier.
The whole Crocoduck thing just made Cameron look stupid and niave.
As for the atheist side, I thought they could have done without the under the breath comments and some of their rhetoric which was unnecessarily inflammatory. It would have helped if Brian new the laws of thermodynamics and if Kelly had been less nervous.
I’m not sure why you would think that I might think you’re too stupid to answer any question I might pose. That’s a puzzling response.
Same here. I went back a few months before you did.
No problem since I’ve never asked for an explanation about your going back to church. You gave your reasons in a thread that I linked earlier which was self-explanatory.
My only comments to you in this thread have been regarding your participation here in post 78:
and here in post 85:
My only point was to wonder if you see the apparent contradiction of you saying that you went back to being a Christian because of one person (Richard Dawkins) who is seen by many to be an outlying atheist that is eschewed by many other atheists while simultaneously saying that no one should believe Kirk Cameron represents Christianity.
I’m sure if you asked many atheists I’ve read on message boards whether Richard Dawkins represents their views, they’d say no. So it seems contradictory to think that although you would convert based on the testimony of one outlying atheist who doesn’t represent the views of many atheists, that some people wouldn’t deconvert based on Kirk Cameron’s poor representation of Christianity.
But of course, you don’t owe me or anyone else an explanation if you do see the contradiction but choose to behave in a contradictory manner. That’s not uncommon in Christianity either.
Or perhaps you went back to Christianity for other reasons than were elaborated in the OP of that thread and don’t want to talk about those reasons either which is fine. I’m just commenting on the parts that have been written about here.
But I didn’t go back to church because of just one person. I clearly stated in my OP on that thread that there was an entire thread devoted to Dawkins, and the opinions voiced by several people in that thread pushed me in a directioin I’d been leaning for some time. I said all of that in my OP.
In any event, I still fail to see any correlation between my going back to church, regardless of the reason, and my refusing to accept that a crackpot represents my religious beliefs.