“We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam"

[Jimbuna]

Religion...don't you just love it

[TarJak]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Religion...don't you just love it

No

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

Maybe for people who clump everything together, but not for the true believer who is guided by the Words of Jesus not by the words of man.

http://www.christinyou.net/pages/Xnotrel.html

And yet...

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1.27)

But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God. 1 Timothy 5.4

That is not to say that Christianity is not the "personal, spiritual presence of the risen and living Lord Jesus Christ" but equally it is, whether officially founded by Jesus or not, a form of religion, one that was founded on the teachings of Christ, not by him but by his words and actions, just as Buddhism was founded on the teachings of Gautama Buddha.

That being said, I can understand the problems inherant in calling it a religion, Jesus wasn't exactly a big fan of organised religion, and thus for a Christian to describe it as a religion would make it one of the things that Christ campaigned against, however you cannot deny that humanity has made it into a religion in the years following the cruxifiction of Jesus, and that religion has in turn splintered into different denominations, just as other religions have. You see, the problem with any belief system is the human bit, the bible itself may be the word of God, but it's the word of God filtered through humans, and that in itself has been altered over centuries of transcription, from ancient Hebrew to Latin to English, and changed depending on the whims of those who have authorised its transcription.
Thus the teachings of Christ as written in the King James bible may not necessarily be the teachings as originally put forward, certainly not verbatim. In turn, each person takes away a different viewpoint from the already altered words of Christ, and uses that viewpoint as their own personal belief. For example, Christ believed in passive resistance against authority, and yet his word and name have been used in active aggression against people of all creeds and beliefs. Are the men who marched on Jerusalem in 1099 true followers of Christ? So many Jews and Muslims were butchered when Raymond of Toulouse conquered the city, and yet he was convinced that he was doing the work of the Lord and of Christ.

By its original intention, Christianity may not have been intended to be a religion, but a religion it has become, like it or not, and humanity has only itself to blame for that.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by TarJak

No

Oh come on....add a little politics and a dose of bigotry and you've got a fine feast to feed on

[August]

Originally Posted by TarJak

In actual fact, Christianity is simply another Judaic sect. Nothing more nothing less.

Maybe between Protestant sects but Catholicism is a very different animal.

All due respect to the dictionary people but calling Christianity a religion is like lumping buses, cars and trucks together and calling them automobiles.

[TarJak]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Oh come on....add a little politics and a dose of bigotry and you've got a fine feast to feed on

True

Originally Posted by August

Maybe between Protestant sects but Catholicism is a very different animal.

No I think you'll find that Catholicism is a sect that split off the same Orthodox Christian root sect of Judaism. The Protestant sects are merely sectarian branches of Catholicism. They all trace their roots back to the same Judaic sect that believed that Jesus was the Messiah.

All due respect to the dictionary people but calling Christianity a religion is like lumping buses, cars and trucks together and calling them automobiles.

Well they are. Particularly if you stick to the root of the word which was late 19th century: from French, from auto- 'self' + mobile 'mobile'.

You Americans perverted it into meaning a car. Mind you by the American dictionary definitions they all qualify.

n. A self-propelled passenger vehicle that usually has four wheels and an internal-combustion engine, used for land transport.

adj. Of or relating to automobiles; automotive.

[Oberon]

To be honest, it took a Hindu man to make the best point about Christianity:

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by August

All due respect to the dictionary people but calling Christianity a religion is like lumping buses, cars and trucks together and calling them automobiles.

On the other hand a devout Muslim would make the same distinction. His belief is real, and therefore not another religion.

[Wolferz]

There's still that big "lie" in the middle of belief. Mostly due to the meddling of men who sought control over their peers through spiritual manipulation. Also known as brainwashing. Every major religion is guilty of it. Some more than others. I won't mention any names because they know who and what they they are.

[Platapus]

Would it be more appropriate to refer to christanity as a group of religions?

Of course that would mean we have a universally accepted definition of what a religion is. Which we ain't got.

[Mr Quatro]

No we can't group them all together ...

for one they don't even know they are doing the wrong thing by being led by a man telling them what to do instead of the words of Jesus Christ the true son of God.

If you ask a Catholic person if they are a Christian ... they will say, "No" we are Catholics.

Christ like, being like Christ, Christ means the anointed one, the promised one. Christianity is being filled with the Spirit of the living God.

We are predestined to be like Christ (I would have to find the scripture, but it is written)

We don't know what we will be like when Jesus comes back, but we do know that we will be more like Him. 1 john 3:2

This is what Jesus thinks of religion: St Matthew 7:22-23

"Not all those who say ‘You are our Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven. The only people who will enter the kingdom of heaven are those who do what my Father in heaven wants.

Jesus will reject many who believe in religion upon His return to earth.

"On the last day many people will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, we spoke for you, and through you we forced out demons and did many miracles.’ Then I will tell them clearly, ‘Get away from me, you who do evil. I never knew you.’

I don't mean to argue the difference in Christ and religion. I just want to defend my faith.

As for Mr Gandhi ... I have yet to meet anyone from India that I like either, but I'll keep looking lol

[mapuc]

Today in our modern world..it could be that Christianity isn't a religion for some and it is for other

Many century ago Christianity or it's believe it was a religion

people, most of them, lived by the holy Bible

that's how I understand it.

Furthermore

Every religious believer think they have God's approval and are the right one in God's view and the others are not.

Markus

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

As for Mr Gandhi ... I have yet to meet anyone from India that I like either, but I'll keep looking lol

It's funny that you should say that, because Gandhi and Jesus have a lot of similarities in their behaviour. Both of them came from occupations that were completely unrelated to their future roles, Gandhi was a lawyer, Jesus a carpenter, both dealt with an occupying force, Jesus the Roman Empire, Gandhi the British Empire, and both called for non-violent resistance to the occupation.
If you take a historical look at some of Jesus's sayings, you'll see just how much of a rebel he was, take for example this famous quote:

But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you. —Matthew 5:39-42

I'm going to bring across something I read on a blog a while ago and put it here:

"But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also."

This specifically refers to a hand striking the side of a person’s face, tells quite a different story when placed in it’s proper historical context. In Jesus’s time, striking someone of a lower class ( a servant) with the back of the hand was used to assert authority and dominance. If the persecuted person “turned the other cheek,” the discipliner was faced with a dilemma. The left hand was used for unclean purposes, so a back-hand strike on the opposite cheek would not be performed. Another alternative would be a slap with the open hand as a challenge or to punch the person, but this was seen as a statement of equality. Thus, by turning the other cheek the persecuted was in effect putting an end to the behavior or if the slapping continued the person would lawfully be deemed equal and have to be released as a servant/slave.

I can attest to the original poster’s comments. A few years back I took an intensive seminar on faith-based progressive activism, and we spent an entire unit discussing how many of Jesus’ instructions and stories were performative protests designed to shed light on and ridicule the oppressions of that time period as a way to emphasize the absurdity of the social hierarchy and give people the will and motivation to make changes for a more free and equal society.
For example, the next verse (Matthew 5:40) states “And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.” In that time period, men traditionally wore a shirt and a coat-like garment as their daily wear. To sue someone for their shirt was to put them in their place - suing was generally only performed to take care of outstanding debts, and to be sued for one’s shirt meant that the person was so destitute the only valuable thing they could repay with was their own clothing. However, many cultures at that time (including Hebrew peoples) had prohibitions bordering on taboo against public nudity, so for a sued man to surrender both his shirt and his coat was to turn the system on its head and symbolically state, in a very public forum, that “I have no money with which to repay this person, but they are so insistent on taking advantage of my poverty that I am leaving this hearing buck-ass naked. His greed is the cause of a shameful public spectacle.”

All of a sudden an action of power (suing someone for their shirt) becomes a powerful symbol of subversion and mockery, as the suing patron either accepts the coat (and therefore full responsibility as the cause of the other man’s shameful display) or desperately chases the protester around trying to return his clothes to him, making a fool of himself in front of his peers and the entire gathered community.
Additionally, the next verse (Matthew 5:41; “If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.”) was a big middle finger to the Romans who had taken over Judea and were not seen as legitimate authority by the majority of the population there. Roman law stated that a centurion on the march could require a Jew (and possibly other civilians as well, although I don’t remember explicitly) to carry his pack at any time and for any reason for one mile along the road (and because of the importance of the Roman highway system in maintaining rule over the expansive empire, the roads tended to be very well ordered and marked), however he could not require any service beyond the next mile marker. For a Jewish civilian to carry a centurion’s pack for an entire second mile was a way to subvert the authority of the occupying forces. If the civilian wouldn’t give the pack back at the end of the first mile, the centurion would either have to forcibly take it back or report the civilian to his commanding officer (both of which would result in discipline being taken against the soldier for breaking Roman law) or wait until the civilian volunteered to return the pack, giving the Judean native implicit power over the occupying Roman and completely subverting the power structure of the Empire. Can you imagine how demoralizing that must have been for the highly ordered Roman armies that patrolled the region?
Jesus was a pacifist, but his teachings were in no way passive. There’s a reason he was practically considered a terrorist by the reigning powers, and it wasn’t because he healed the sick and fed the hungry.

You can see, through historical context how different the true meaning of these words were than how they are portrayed in society today. In short, different times meant that things meant different things than they do today (that really wasn't much shorter, was it? ). Which brings me back to the various translations of the bible. When someone says that they follow the bible, do they mean that they follow the original copy which has been lost to time, because that is the only one that will not contain some form of editing or alteration in it. It's like a game of Chinese whispers, eventually degradation will slip in and things will change. Let's not forget either that back before the invention of the printing press, each bible was hand transcribed in latin, meaning that only the priests could understand it and preach it. Who is to say that each preaching priest did not add his own slant to the text, in order to please a certain noble or a reigning monarch?

Do Christians go to church? Do Christians believe that the pope is God representative on earth? Does this not go against the beliefs of Jesus against authority and organised religion? The extravagance of the Vatican, the gold and silver of the church, does this not remind anyone of the gold being counted in the temples? There are so, so many contradictions between organised religion based around Christ and the teachings of Christ that it's little wonder that so many people have moved away from it, it is hypocritical and if there's one thing that people hate, it's hypocrisy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not attacking the words of Christ, nor am I directly attacking your faith, it's good to have faith in something, but it's when these words are twisted into things that they are not, when a whole organisation which contradicts the meaning of Jesus's words is built up around them, that makes me sad, and I think that if Jesus did come back and saw what we have done with what he said, he would be sad too.

[TarJak]

One wonders why your faith needs defending?

Perhaps you need the assistance of the ultimate defender:

[mapuc]

On a friends wall(he's a Muslim) I wrote

Any religion that have to do such things against its believers is a religion in crisis

Markus