enton said:
By the way I am a born-again man. I think whom you met are not christians, but claiming to be "Christians" inasmuch as they`re basing on the Bible so they thought they`re "Christians." Christians don`t practice thithing but concentrate more on preaching the gospel.
Bingo! Perfectly proving Medicine*Woman's point.
On six continents of this Earth are people who worship God and Jesus Christ. They go to temples known in English as "churches". The one notable symbol common to all of them is some form of a cross (the Orthodox church cross has two bars). The Bible for all of these worshippers consists of an Old Testament containing (at minimum) the same books as are to be found in the Jewish scriptures, plus twenty seven books (only small outlying sects in the Eastern church accept more as canonical) universally regarded as the Good News of Jesus Christ. As the world understands the term, these people (a
substantial portion of the world's population) are known as
Christians. A large majority of all these Christians worldwide are members of the oldest and principal of all the subsections, the Catholic Church, headed by the Pope. Individually the level of belief and the different kinds of practice vary widely, but undoubtedly the one common denominator is that the practicing ones worship and love Jesus Christ.
What makes "born agains" or ECs as I call them (standing for Evangelical Christians) strange is first of all their insistence (a la
enton above) that
they are the only true Christians. They are not a sect among many other sects, they are apparently the only real Christians in the world.
I must say I do find it bizarre that ECs might watch film of the coronation of the Queen in Westminster Abbey, some nuns ladling soup to the homeless on the streets of New York, South American peasants toiling up to a church on a hillside, the Russian Orthodox faithful crossing Red Square to attend a service in St Basils after seven decades of official government atheist repression, or (as I saw on the History Channel the other week) newsreel footage of a group of Japanese survivors in a wrecked shell of a church in Hiroshima, heads bowed in prayer and supplication; that the EC will look at all at that, shake his head and say, "Nope. Not Christian. Though I'm sure they
think they're Christian!"
