Originally posted by Mark Luper
Neubob, you totally missed the words he used that answered all those examples you wrote. "True Christians" A true Christian is a follower of Christ. You won't find them doing the things you stated above. Beleive me when I say that the people that do and have done what you stated are not true Christians. They do not beleive in Christ and his teachings. They are people with thier own agenda that use the name of whatever religion they wish to further it.
Mark
No, Mark, I didn't miss anything. I understood what he meant perfectly. I just didn't feel like dignifying his idiocy with anything better than an outburst. Since it is you who speaks now, however, I will attempt civility....
Take the world's entire population.... Now take away all the petty sinners, all the people that use religion for their vanity more than anything else, all the people that are intolerant of others, unforgiving, narrow-minded, greedy, judgmental, unwise and unsympathetic... You've got like 3 people remaining. And I'll be willing to bet you that those three people are just as likely to be Buddhists, Jews or, gasp, agnostics.
His proclaimation that Christians are somehow better was faulted in at least two ways.
First of all, by making that statement in the first place, and implying that he ranks himself among this population of 'true Christians', he exhibited the worst kind of spiritual vanity--both personal and on behalf of all Christians.... Bad Christian.
Second, by making statements that implicate others before himself, he was judgmental, narrow-minded and overbroad.... Bad Christian.
But my original point remains valid. All those vile characters I mentioned earlier, the pedophile priests, the guys with the thumb screws, the idiots with the picket signs at the funeral... All (or at least most) of these pieces of human waste also believed that they were 'true Christians'. They'd deluded themselves into thinking they were better--much like the poster who started this conversation.
Calling it a personal agenda is a cop-out, partly because there is no bright line between a personal agenda and doing the lord's work. Just answer the question of why you do good deeds-because you want to get to heaven or because you want to please god, or do you do them because you just want to be good? And if you just want to be good, why do you need the bible and the church to guide you? Isn't being good already good enough? So then why do you need Christianity at all? Because being good is not good enough? Or do you just need an instruction manual on what is good and what isn't? But don't you, an intelligent man, already know what good is? So why do you need Christianity? Are Christians all too dumb to understand what is good and what isn't good, intuitively? Of course not, so why do you need Christ? Why not just be good for the sake of being good? It's more efficient that way, isn't it? And god gave you free will and wants you to use it, right? So are you following Christ because maybe you need to please god too? Why? Because you want to get to heaven? Isn't that sort of selfish, when it comes down to it? A personal agenda, if you will...And those aren't the hallmarks of a true Christian.
It's not easy to answer, and I truly believe that most of those nitwits believed that they were doing god's work. They get lost in the tangle of belief and wind up doing stuff that isn's so great, but seems righteous. Most were just not smart enough to see some of the paradoxes.
Such thinking, once it's really sunk in, allows for basically weak and stupid people to do some pretty cruel things to those they see as different. And therefore anybody who beats their chest and uses phrases like 'true Christian', or, for that matter 'true muslim' or 'true atheist', is really nothing but a 'true idiot'.
