John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> > But more to the point, who gets to define what is Christian (which was
> > the point of asking for an explanation of that statement), as throughout
> > history a lot of things are done in Christianity's name - so who gets to
> > decide "yes, that's a Christian thing to do" and "no, that's not a
> > Christian thing to do and one who does it isn't Christian".

> That's not hard.  Read the Bible and see what it says about how to 
> become a Christian, and what it commands Christians to do.  Then compare 
> it to the doings of the religious bodies in question.  Time and again, 
> at so many points of teaching, we find things taught and practiced that 
> cannot be found in the Bible, from even the very basics of becoming a 
> Christian, to the organization of the church, liturgy, and so forth.

  If it were that simple, there wouldn't be something like 30000 different
denominations of Christianity (if I remember the estimate correctly).

  In modern times the interpretation of different denominations is always
colored by what is generally understood as (secular) basic human rights.
In medieval times the Catholic church (and other minor denominations of
the time) had no problem in accepting, for example, the witch killing
statutes of the old testament. Nowadays those statutes are almost globally
dismissed as not applying anymore (the reason varying wildly from
denomination to denomination, and even between individual Christians).
Not because christianity had changed on its own, but because nowadays
the secular notion of basic human rights abhors such statutes, and
christianity has adapted.

  Would you say that the Catholic church was not "true christianity" at
the time when it still persecuted witches? Why doesn't it persecute them
nowadays? What has changed?

  The thing is, when talking about what is morally right and wrong, the
Bible is a pick-and-choose book. Everybody chooses the passages that
conform to their own sense of morality (often colored by secular notions
of human rights) and dismisses the passages that don't (by using wildly
differing justifications on why the passage in question doesn't hold
anylonger).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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