Edit: Man, I wish I could actually edit comments fo realsies because typos make me crazy. Anyway!
I actually considered adding a note that people with certain religious affiliations have even less room to bitch than straight people or white people, because those latter two things are innate characteristics whereas someone can totally just choose to stop attending Catholic mass.
I'm not a Christian myself, but I did study the Bible. In my experience, people take whatever morality from the Bible that they had when they approached it, because the Christians who make bad neighbors (guys like Breitvik) and the Christians who make good neighbors (I need to wear a button that says, "I love Quakers! ASK ME WHY.") are both working from the same sound Biblical footing. Neither of them is doing Christianity "wrong" as far as I can tell. Some are just falling into the pitfalls of faith and some are managing not to, but neither is really more Christian than the other in my mind.
If Christian communities want to make that distinction, that's what orthodoxy is all about. If some Christian denominations say Ann Coulter's no Christian, or Michele Bachmann's no Christian, or Glenn Beck's no Christian or Breitvik's no Christian, they can do that. I'm not really in a position to kick those folks out of someone else's club, though. If they self-identify as Christians and have Christians who identify them the same way, that means a lot more than my opinion.
I think I feel that way about it because despite being an atheist, I'm also a practicing Wiccan. (Another atheist I know summed it up better than my rambly self can by saying, "Oh! So you're Wiccan like I'm Jewish," so I use that as the quick version now. *laugh*) I have had people straight-up tell me that I am not Wiccan. They're not members of my circle. They're not even members of my local community. They don't know me at all. All they know is that they don't like me, and it doesn't matter to them whether I and my High Priest and High Priestess and our whole circle acknowledge me as part of the family.
That's not an experience that I feel right passing on, so even if someone is a hateful dirtbag, I'm not going to take my disapproval of them as sufficient reason to say, "That's not a real Christian." I would like it if bigotry were not a theologically legitimate way of being Christian, but it sort of is. =/
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chiming
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Date: 2011-07-27 04:35 am (UTC)From:I actually considered adding a note that people with certain religious affiliations have even less room to bitch than straight people or white people, because those latter two things are innate characteristics whereas someone can totally just choose to stop attending Catholic mass.
I'm not a Christian myself, but I did study the Bible. In my experience, people take whatever morality from the Bible that they had when they approached it, because the Christians who make bad neighbors (guys like Breitvik) and the Christians who make good neighbors (I need to wear a button that says, "I love Quakers! ASK ME WHY.") are both working from the same sound Biblical footing. Neither of them is doing Christianity "wrong" as far as I can tell. Some are just falling into the pitfalls of faith and some are managing not to, but neither is really more Christian than the other in my mind.
If Christian communities want to make that distinction, that's what orthodoxy is all about. If some Christian denominations say Ann Coulter's no Christian, or Michele Bachmann's no Christian, or Glenn Beck's no Christian or Breitvik's no Christian, they can do that. I'm not really in a position to kick those folks out of someone else's club, though. If they self-identify as Christians and have Christians who identify them the same way, that means a lot more than my opinion.
I think I feel that way about it because despite being an atheist, I'm also a practicing Wiccan. (Another atheist I know summed it up better than my rambly self can by saying, "Oh! So you're Wiccan like I'm Jewish," so I use that as the quick version now. *laugh*) I have had people straight-up tell me that I am not Wiccan. They're not members of my circle. They're not even members of my local community. They don't know me at all. All they know is that they don't like me, and it doesn't matter to them whether I and my High Priest and High Priestess and our whole circle acknowledge me as part of the family.
That's not an experience that I feel right passing on, so even if someone is a hateful dirtbag, I'm not going to take my disapproval of them as sufficient reason to say, "That's not a real Christian." I would like it if bigotry were not a theologically legitimate way of being Christian, but it sort of is. =/