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General - VGC Poll: Religion - View Post

Slimebeast on 07 February 2009
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Soleron said:
Slimebeast said:
...

This is ridiculous and plain wrong.

There is not a religion called baptism, nor lutheran, nor orthodox, nor catholic. They're all christians. They belong to the christian religion.

For clarification: many catholics may call themselves simply "Catholic" or "Roman catholic" just to point out that they belong to the universal/true/original (=catholic) church of Christ (as opposed to all the christian sects out there). But Catholics officialy declare themselves to be christians. This is not debatable.


Edit: I'm not saying it's your fault SciFiBoy, it's because of squabble between christians and how people chose to reply in the thread, but you really should fix it and sort people under the right category.

On the contrary, religion isn't formalised at all*. People can say and believe any combination of possible beliefs at all, and are entitled to use any label they want to describe themselves. SciFiBoy is recording what label people use on themselves, not what groupings some academic or religious leader declares. In this respect, people who use the term "Lutheran" may consider themselves Christian or not, and it's impossible to place them except with the words they themselves use.

So, you can't say there is no such religion as "X". Some people will consider "X" a seperate religion, and, by definition, it then is.

*This doesn't mean some religions aren't formal, it means you can not be a member of e.g. the Catholic church and still consider yourself a Catholic just as much as a member.

 

 

Well, you're right - it's a subjective thing.

But it's extremeley rare that people regard themselves as "catholic but not christian", "lutheran but not christian" and so on. It's the squabble between the different christian churches that has caused people to identify themselves externally (is that the right word?) with a label of a sub-group of christianity, but 99.9% of them also identify themselves as christian.
(Jehova's Witnesses and hormones I'm not entirely sure of, but about Catholics, orthodox, lutherans, baptists I know that they also claim to be christians. I even feel stupid to have to tell this because it's a no-brainer)