Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Oct 20, 2017 2:32 pm
You see, just as not everybody who calls himself a "Christian" is actually one, so too there are groups that are genuinely Christian, and those who are so only in name -- but without the essential practices or beliefs that make a Christian a Christian. You may say, "Well, they CALL themselves Christians," but what do you know? You're not even in the stadium. You have no idea.
So don't judge by "sects": judge us all by the degree to which we obey what is clearly taught in Scripture. It's nowhere near so hard to figure it out as you seem to be imagining. But you'd have to know what Christians really are in order to see that. From outside, you would really have no way to judge.
This is the longest-standing faulty reasoning by any and every Christian. You can only see its fault as an outsider. Each Christian will swear and actually defend his or her faith by arms that he or she is the follower of the ONLY true version of Christianity. You Christians discount each other's strength and trueness of belief. This is not good, man, this is not good. No two atheists have ever disagreed on the tenets of their beliefs. Yet Christians' only plausible defense of lack of unity is that other sects are not true believers.
Bah! Your argument can only be proven and it can only prove the trueness of the scriptures, if a positive reinforcement by logic can be found. But it can't be found. The Faith of A Catholic Christian is the same as the faith of an Evangelist Christian: both are based on the bible, yet they are different.
Of course the Evangelist will argue that the Catholic faith is based on other things as well as the bible; and the Catholic believer will argue that the Evangelists are heretics.
This is why I decry your faith, or the strength of the bible: Christians can't agree on their most sacred thing, on their faith, and they blame other followers for it, who otherwise have the same right to claim their own sect to be the only true one.
To make things worse, the believers truly believe that other sects' followers are horribly wrong. It takes an outsider to see that you are all different, and yet you each claim the one book to be the source of your faith. To an outsider Christian Faith X is equivalent to Christian Faith Y, inasmuch as both are based on the life of Christ. To each Christian, whether he belong to version A, B, C... or X or Y their own version is the only unassailable faith.
However, there is a tenet in logic, "Nothing can both be true and not true at the same time and in the same respect." This is the law of the excluded middle. Christianity proves itself wrong, without any outside pressure, by being the same and different as itself and from itself at the same time and in the same respect.
This is why I say that the word of god as spelled out in the Gospels is a proof that God failed to convey his message. It may mean other, more plausible things, of course, as well: for instance, that he does not exist, and the entire exercise of believing that the bible is written by people inspired by god is wrong, a mistake, a hyped-up faux faith, and this makes more and more sense to a lot more people than before.