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Quote by: Vernon Christian can mean, fourthly & finally, "a civilized human being who lives a decent, respectable and presentable life".
Since Christianity has been and, in my opinion, still is by far and away the most powerful force for good, for civilization, in any human society on the face of the earth, it is not hard to see how someone can perceive himself as Christian on the basis of being a civilized, law-abiding and respectable human being. |
Such bald faced hubris. I am not a Buddhist but if you look at history you will find that Buddhism is older than Christianity and percentage wise has had just a tiny fraction of all the misery, wars, prejudice and intolerance practiced in the name of Jesus as has been practiced in the name of Buddha. In fact historically Christianity has not been all that much better than no religion at all whereas a very good case could be made that Buddhism contains some sort of active ingredient that actually has the ability to make men more peaceful and kinder to their fellow man. Not to say that Buddhist have not been and are not currently intolerant or violent, it is just that historically they are far less so than Christians.
As for the rest of it I agree that Catholics have more reason to call themselves Christians than any other group that does so except perhaps for the Gnostics. As much as Christians would like to think that their religion represents some sort of exemplar of kindness and love many are clueless as to how it came to be. That the bible was the result of a power struggle among all the variants of the purported teachings of Jesus and the victor of that struggle got to make the bible. That at the time of Jesus there was no such thing as a Christian and that Jesus said in his own words that he was not here for the gentile but for the Jew. The various forms of the religion that calls itself Catholic or Christian was not created by Jesus but by Saul. If Jesus were alive today he would be very angry and when he calmed down he would laugh his ass off.
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