“God is the father, Christ is the Son and Man is the Holy Spirit.” Although perhaps a non-standard view of divine Holiness, there exists the precept that human-kind shares the “self-same” spirit as God and Christ. Thus we would have “God is a Man”, so anything written by Man is the true word of God.
It’s up to us as individuals to judge, and to look in our own hearts for the Good that is there. “Love your brother as you love yourself” is the commandment, however I’m not sure all would agree that’s what makes someone a Christian.
Fundamental question: Can a person define himself or herself as a Christian or must that person’s Christian-ness be accepted by someone else who is regarded by the community as a Christian?
There is God, but it is formless and doesn’t interfere in sporting events
Jesus, a man, provided instructions for living well and worshipping Him
good works are not required for salvation, only asking for forgiveness of sin.
Praying to Jesus is a good way to go about things
I’m in no position to call Mormons non-Christian if they say they’re Christian. Rocks and glass houses, etc. I have other beliefs about Christianity, the gospels, the Pope, Eternal Progression etc, but they don’t “form my Christianity.” For instance, I hate Gnostics and think they’re wrong, but that’s my human failing, because I’m supposed to love them, end of story. In that vein, arguing on Facebook is a sin against God.
Which I will commit right now:
Per the tangent, figuring out what Constantine thought about Christians is not hard. There are lots of records and everything. Someone will even tell you. (Don’t worry, tomndebb, it’s not actually about “the sign” despite its title.)
I agree with Der Trihs.
I don’t know why we should listen to a worldly Christian body about anything.
Unqualified acceptance of self-definition would lead to such absurdities as that a person who eats a pound of meat every day should be considered a vegetarian if he says he is a vegetarian. It would be similarly absurd for a person who calls himself a Christian to deny that Christ was a historical person, and that the New Testament contains any divinely revealed truth. And deference to the judgement of any number of people who hold the same view does not make the view any less absurd.
I’m not 100% in agreement with this - surely there have to be some criteria where we can say “Those guys are definitely not Christians”. I mean, I have no hesitation in saying Jews for Jesus aren’t really Jews. Of course, I have no idea what those criteria may be.
But I think a “Christian” sect claiming Jesus was really a reptile-man from Zord and he’ll send his Flying Polyps to come to take the livers of the faithful back to Zord where they will be bodily resurrected in His Holy Clone Tanks? That’s not really Christian.
Why? Because that’s so much more unlikely than him being the son of the entity that created the entire universe? According to dictionaries, it’s about following what you think he teaches, not what his resume was.
The question is whether the self-definition is reasonable, and I hope we can agree that reason does not exist where something may be defined as its opposite, as in the case of a “vegetarian” who eats a pound of meat every day. If that is in dispute then we have nothing further to say to each other.
Why not? You distilled Christianity down to the core substance, just changed the paint. Like saying Romeo and Juliet in Da Hood isn’t really Romeo and Juliet. It might be a horrible derivative, but it’s still the same.
It’s like Muslims who call other Muslim sects apostates and heretics. I’m sure there’s interesting historical and ideological differences, but to me they all believe some goofy supernatural stuff about Muhammad and in the organizational part of my brain that trumps whatever other differences they have, so they’re all Muslims to me.
'T’aint no mind-reading going on here, dude. Either you’re intentionally spreading misinformation–which has been refuted repeatedly on this very site and you have actually seen the correct information–or you simply can’t process a passage written in quite clear English or you’re emotionally invested in the malarkey you’re posting being accepted by others.
I think your logic is right, to go deeper, there is a common thread in mythos preceding the period of Christ that I’ve read about.
I think to truly answer the question posed at the beginning of the thread, one would have to admit it is probably a subjective opinion. This based on how many factors of similarity it would require (for each person) to satisfy a common system of belief.
I could call myself a Christian because I believe in the power within the message of Christ, but I could also call myself a pagan because I honor the mythos in some of the esoteric writings that preceded Christ, and some after as well. I like to keep it open, because I find that sometimes I benefit from spiritual lessons of varying cultures depending on where I’m at. When in Rome, etc. I guess I really identify myself as both. But that probably doesn’t sit well with a lot of people and that I really don’t understand. It’s my soul, after all.
I’ll probably be corrected by someone more knowledgeable, but it’s my understanding that Moslems believe in Jesus, but not in Jesus Christ, in the sense they believe he was a great prophet (not the greatest, of course), but not the Messiah. Christ is a title, not a last name. So, yes, Moslems believe in the teachings of Jesus (no idea whether all the teachings or some of them), but they still aren’t Christians.
