Greatest Sect of Christianity

[Kidlicious]

Oh I haven't actually voted on what the best sect is. I was reading a similar thread and someone commented that they didn't go to church because they didn't preach the gospel. Billy Graham preached the gospel everytime, and although preachers like Billy Graham are few and far between ... baptists

[Jon Miller]

Of course people are probably thinking I'm being legalistic, but it's not really about how you dress. A person could wear a head covering and still have no respect for God, but if they are showing off their tits even a fool can see that they don't have respect for God. And the same goes for anyone who encourages them to disrespect God.

I know this hasn't been what the thread was about for a while, but now you are in some way saying that my interpretation is correct.

I said that Paul was talking about being respectable in the church (in particular, in dress). About 2 thousand years ago that might be head coverings. Today, in some western churches, that might mean wearing less revealing clothes.

But an important point is that we should not be cherry picking in our interpretation. Cherry picking is not looking at the whole when we make our interpretation. Whether a liberal does it, a conservative does it, or a non-Christian does it.

Another important point is that we are interpreting things. Same as Paul and the other writers.

JM
(Not that I am in any way against revealing clothes, but I do think if $X clothes are the ones you would wear to the 'club', then even if they are your best they are probably not what you should wear to church.)

[MOBIUS]

Can we ban Kid for being Ben's DL.

[Kidlicious]

JM, we both agree that we shouldn't cherry pick and believe every word. I might be might be more conservative than you, but I don't consider you liberal. But just because we disagree we shouldn't accuse each other of cherry picking.

[Elok]

Compare each other to priests getting adulterous oral sex, sure. But not cherry-picking.

[loinburger]

Also, Loin seems to have forgotten that thread a few months back where Kid told all the atheists that they were necessarily immoral. And don't forget that Imran, at least, is a convert. Don't recall how JM started.

I was also a "convert" of sorts when I went from Catholic to atheist, but the advantage of this conversion is that there isn't much of an official dogma to adhere to - rather than going from "Jesus is my lord and savior and so on" to "I want to pork Richard Dawkins" in a relatively short period of time, I was able to gradually make the transition without a priest/minister/whoever to tell me I was doing it wrong.

Which is not to say that there aren't horribly annoying atheist converts, but in my experience they're usually annoying because they're rebels without a cause/clue. "I'm mad a God, so I'm an atheist!" "So, you're punishing God by 'believing' that he doesn't exist?" "Yeah!" "Ugh"

[Kidlicious]

It's kind of like eating babies. There's no wrong way to do it.

[loinburger]

You don't know what you're talking about - the wrong way to eat babies is with ketchup.

[Kidlicious]

You don't know what you're talking about - the wrong way to eat babies is with ketchup.

Atheist dogma

[loinburger]

Spoken like somebody who would put ketchup on a ribeye

[Elok]

Loin, re: conversion, part of the distinction probably comes from atheism not being a belief so much as the negation of a belief. With atheism alone, it's impossible to follow the steps I posted (which, BTW, Kid, were not meant for you specifically), because it's a totally passive thing. You don't go to church or pray and...that's about it. There's no positive action to be taken to "live the faith" at all. Is there?

Now, if you slap something else on top of it, say a form of secular humanism, it becomes easier to "live the faith" and subsequently be a PITA about it. But I don't think I want to get into that.

[Elok]

Can we ban Kid for being Ben's DL.

While Kid's views may be extreme, he doesn't resort to BK's favored strategy of petty villainy mixed with outright lies. Be fair.

[loinburger]

Loin, re: conversion, part of the distinction probably comes from atheism not being a belief so much as the negation of a belief.

Exactly. In my case it was a matter of "well this part of the faith doesn't make sense, so I'm going to drop that for now" -> "well this part of the faith doesn't make sense, so I'm going to drop that for now" and so on, which took about five years until I noticed that there wasn't anything left.

[Elok]

Anyway, I'll make sure that you're wrong about my future Elok. Also, you don't seem to know that many Christians. Many have been converted for a long time and never lose their piety. And if they do a lot of the time they get it back. Did you know that most of the people who got saved at Billy Graham Crusades were already christians?

I don't think you understand the point of those stages. The worst parts are in the beginning, not the end; if those apply to you presently, it's not your future that you should be worried about. I didn't mean for them to be a dig at you, though. It was more of a general commentary on the conversion experience.

And yes, most of the people Billy Graham "saved" were at least nominally Christian. I don't know much about that, but I expect a distressing number of them went into that first stage.

[Jon Miller]

I think you are wrong Elok. I think that all denominations, including my own, have a lot of spiritually dead Christians. People who grow up among them, often don't see anything, and then leave/drift away into some weak form of deism/agnosticism or atheism.

Revival and awakening is often necessary, and the new convert can be in the best of possible positions. Often it is easier to have a revival/awakening by changing denominations, because the individual is deadened to those same aspects of their own denomination.

The zeal can lead in wrong directions (away from spiritual life) though, just like every human belief/thought/action/emotion.

JM