So What Does "being Christian" Actually Mean To You>?

I get what you're saying Asmo. But one of the cardinal things in Christianity is surely 'love thy neighbour'.One could probably say that is the basis of Christian ethics. So to me it would seem that to be Christian would be to at least have this intention, even if one can't actually carry it out for whatever reason.

 

Seems to be a mental shield for some to negate their nefarious actions. I've been taken advantage of by professing christians. Some in particular would brag about getting an advantage, a job , or money that wasn't supposed to happen ---but then quickly add---"BUT THAT'S BUSINESS," when hit by the tiny bit of conscience that would bleed through. There are good christians--I've met some, but they didn't blab about it as some continually do. When I hear--"and that's when I met the lord," or" I have a personal relationship with jesus/the lord, " for some reason, I check my wallet.

 

Well maybe because Christians are supposed to be humble, and someone who makes it a point to publicize their devoutness is not humble. Therefore, maybe they aren't really Christians. I mean, even the devil can quote scripture.

 

Im working on my evangelical technique , send me $500.00 and Ill tell you..

 

Recently, we've all been treated to the spectacle of the Republican frontrunners ostentatiously professing their Christianity. The Donald appeared before Evangelical Christian audiences at Liberty University in Virginia, which has the motto “training champions for Christ.”, and Oral Roberts University in my backyard, Tulsa, Oklahoma--commissioned by God Himself thru Oral, with a mandate to "Raise up your students to hear My voice, to go where My light is dim, where My voice is heard small, and My healing power is not known, even to the uttermost bounds of the earth." At Liberty, Trump won the endorsement of the university's Chancellor, Jerry Falwell, Jr., who shares Trump's views on guns and Muslims. “If more good people had concealed-carry permits," said Fallwell, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed (the San Bernadino victims).” The university offers a free certification course on concealed weapons, and Fallwell said “Let’s teach them a lesson if they ever show up here.”

Actually Ted Cruz was the first of the Republican frontrunners to speak at Liberty this campaign season. He reminded them that:“rights don’t come from man, they come from God almighty” and referred to the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” Not to be outdone, Marco Rubio told the Iowa pastors: "This nation was founded on the belief that every person has natural rights that come from their Creator, and that's where we get free enterprise, that's where we get our republic," he continued. "If you don't have a creator, then what is the source of your rights? The government? The law?"

Cynics might suspect that the religious zeal of these politicians might be a reflection of the coming Iowa caucus and the high concentration of Evangelical voters in that state. Nationwide, religious conservatives comprise about 28% of the population, and Evangelical Christians make up about 29% of the population. Given the attention they command in the media, one might think that a majority of Christians are conservative Evangelicals, and that Jesus is a Republican. Actually, a majority of Christians in this country are moderates or liberals. And the values Jesus expresses in the gospels are in sharp contrast to those of the so-called Moral Majority. The "social agenda" of the religious right focuses on opposing gay rights and abortion and advancing prayer in schools and public life. Jesus said nothing that we know of about abortion and homosexuality (which is odd if they're so important), and He discouraged public prayer--at least the ostentatious kind.(Matthew 6:6). Instead, He emphasized peace, love and understanding, helping the poor, being non-judgmental, and embracing society's rejects.Some of His earliest followers caled themselves, not Christians, but Ebionites (the Poor) and they practiced (gasp) communism. (Acts 2:44;4:32) Good Republican values?

 

Thanks for all your posts. Unfortunately, I can't reply to them all individually.

Anyway, Asmo, I'm a bit confused here.
By "nice" I don't mean someone who's always smiley and chatting to strangers etc , bringing cakes round to their neighbours.
I mean, someone might be really quiet, reclusive and hermitlike, but they could still be a "good person".

I've known some Christians who openly boast "I'm a complete bitch/bastard hahahah". They're really proud of the fact that they cheat, rob, bully, treat friends/colleagues whatever with contempt. They think that memorisiing scriptures and going to church makes them "Christian". I think nothing could be further from the truth.

There's some passage that says something words to the effect that "you are Christian in your heart, and through your actions" etc, not acting like some Religious Education teacher. As said earlier, if the devil went to church and quoted scriptures, does that make him a Christian? Ofcourse not,
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I agree with the earlier posts. Sometimes a church is a "gang", a "networking group" or whatever. Not all good people, sometimes bad ones too.

And I absolutely agree with the comments re far right and its hijacking of Church institutions. I can only think of two "ultra devout" (they claim!) Christians in British politics. Tony Blair - war criminal and pathological liar. Another is a fat evil pig called Ann Widdecombe. She never married and is 75yrs old (surprise surprise) and is always launching these vile attacks against the poor and unemployed. Yet she is a privately educated , talentless child of priviledge+ upper class type croneyism. Both make my skin crawl.

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Anyway, what made me make this post was this. I'd actually thought of the issues before.

I was thinking of someone I've been friends with for a few years.
They're very "devout", were always talking about their church stuff and the bible etc.
But they've basically really, really changed in recent times. Not in the religious way, just in the way they act.

I've held back on speaking in a really "forthright" type of manner to them, but I was probably wrong to refrain for so long.

So now I think "phew I don't treat MY friends like that". And I'm not the even "avid, devote Churchgoing I try and be super nice" type.
The old version of them was really, really good. Atleast as I saw it. But now I just think "wow, they are completely unrecognisable from their former self".

So ofcourse now I just think "how is this compatible with being the big, big Christian they claim to be?"

 

Compared to America, we don't have that big a problem here. Like when Cameron delvers his silly Christmas or Easter messages - I don't think many people take him very seriously.

Even for me as a non-Christian, it's easy to see how he's simply waffling. Maybe he's actually dumb enough to think that his government's assault on the poor, the mentally ill, arms sales to Saudi etc is in some way aligned with Christian values.

 

I'm glad this thread was started. I have been thought about this before a lot.

I have known very devout, Bible-thumping Christians whose lives revolve around worship but who don't know how to treat people decently. They're basically not good people.

Maybe their interpretation of their religion is what enables and emboldens them in this sort of behavior. Maybe it serves as a justification to put a spin on scripture i.e. "righteous anger." Maybe their faith actually makes them deranged.

I knew a girl in college who would wander around sighing and saying "isn't God wonderful?" Meanwhile: if you pointed out a flaw in her looks tactfully and discreetly, she would roll her eyes at you, flip her hair, or shout "shut up!" But if she didn't like your look she would go "eww, you look really trashy." I remember when I was severely depressed. One day I got up and got dressed, determined to enjoy my day. I had on boot-cut jeans, a button-down shirt, tan boots, and a tan floppy hat. She saw me and said "eww, you look really ugly." I went back in my room, took everything off, and went back to sleep.

When I was living with an aunt, I was watching a reality show. My aunt is a very superstitious person who believes, among other strange things, that evil spirits leave the TV and enter the house if you're not watching something wholesome. She burst into the living room and shouted "turn it off...NOW!!" I was outraged. I fired back. I said "you could have said it nicely and I would have done it." "NOW!!" We argued. She won because she was the authority figure. Nowadays I'm polite to her if I encounter her like at a wedding but I take her in small doses.

If I was Christian, Christianity would be about:

-A relationship with God
-Love for self, God, and neighbor
-Altruism
-Peace and being slow to anger
-Forgiveness

These are two examples of why I lost interest in Christianity.

 

I too have met self declared Christians who were not very pleasant and made no attempt to be so. No need to go into details. Clearly, they have some idea of Christianity which doesn't actually involve taking any notice of what the gospels say. Or at least not the parts where 'love thy neighbour' type values are stressed.
That's a problem, but it's not the main reason I'm not a Christian.

'Love God' is one of Christ's 2 main commandments if I'm not mistaken. But the problem I have found is that not a single Christian I ever met seemed to know God, or even to believe that such a thing might be possible. That would appear then to negate any idea of love of God, as how can you love what you don't know? Can a person love some vague and actually quite frightening concept (in the way God is often presented by hellfire type Christians) simply on the basis that they read about or heard about it from someone else?

I have read quite deeply into some areas of Christianity, looking to find those who did make some claim to have actually seen God. There are a few mystics, mainly Catholic who do make such claims. But it became obvious to me that even though these were great people, in general Christianity is not based on any kind of actual spiritual experience in the vast majority of cases. Nor does it seem that many people are going off to church and actually experiencing the reality of the Divine in an immediate way, and as a blissful experience which might lead them towards love. Maybe there are exceptions, but I've never met them.

As a very young child I was sent to a Catholic school run by nuns (I was only there up to age 7). I clearly recall, in fact it's one of my most vivid early memories from school, one day we were shown a painting of a child about to chase a butterfly off the edge of a cliff, and a big angel standing guard over them making sure they wouldn't fall. A nun told us that was the child's guardian angel and we all have one. I asked why we don't see it, and got told that only saints can see angels. I also recall that I wasn't very satisfied with that answer.
And maybe that set the pattern for my subsequent encounters with and inquiries into Christianity.

The whole business of having no real experiential side in Christianity lead me to look into many other spiritual beliefs and paths, where I found, especially in the Yoga philosophy of India, whole sets of practices aimed at actually experiencing the spiritual for oneself. To my mind, that's much more like it.

I don't think religion can be just ethics - or it becomes just ethics with no real spiritual experience to back it up. Nor do I feel that a system of ethics that is ignored by some declared followers can really have much to offer. I think a lot of those 'nasty' type Christians are mainly Christians for social reasons or else just out of fear of damnation.

Sorry if this seems like a bit of a rant, but it's not easy to put into a few words my feelings and thoughts about this.

 

I suspect the problem is the concept of "knowing God". Here in the Bible Belt, I know lots of people who seem sincerely to believe they know God. He's their best buddy and goes fishiin' with them on weekends. Of course, they come from a culture that emphasizes 'born again" experiences and personal relationship with Jesus, but I know these people well and their sense of everyday closeness to divinity is very real. My own "born again" experience (moment of clarity, religious experience, psychotic break, whatever) started with reading a passage in Genesis in a new way. Humans are created in the image and likeness of God, so it must follow that God can be encountered in every human (as can Satan, metaphorically speaking). My understanding of this is similar to the Hindu concept of Atman, and Jewish tradition makes much of it. There is a rabbinic saying that whenever a person walks down the street (s)he is preceeded by angels procaliming "Make way for the image of God." Is it true? Yes, I'm sue, in a profund sense. Is it factual? Irrelevant! For me, it's the postulate I've chosen to live by.

From then on, I've found going to Walmart to be a religious experience. Of course, I interpret Genesis metaphorically, but still the re-framing was transformative and has made living a new adventure for me. I agree with Richard Dawkins that “There is an anesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence." As we're caught up in everyday routines of secular existence, we sometimes feel we're just going through the motions. Dawkins says: "For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways” (Unweaving the Rainbow). When they open their eyes and look around at the wonder of existence, most people I know are filled with awe at the wonder of existence. In An Altar in The World, Barbara Brown Taylor remarks that while many churchgoers are"happy to use inherited maps for some of life's journeys..they too can harbor th sense that there is more to life than they are being shown." She argues that spiritual fulfillment can be found by "engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention." (I think Hindus call it karma yoga). Sometimes, I think the canned spirituality of the churches can be an impediment to this broader experience of divinity. Part of the problem, I think, Is the conventional image of God as the "Dude in the Sky." The Progressive Christians I hang with prefer to use "Great Mystery", Divinity, or the Real to avoid the anthrorpomorphic baggage.

You've mentioned your embrace of Brahmanism and yogic practices. One of the things I admire most about Hinduism is its recognition of the many paths by which people can experience divinity: Jnana yoga, not unlike gnosticism, knowing God through reflection and intuitive understanding; bhakti yoga, stressing adoration of God with every element of one's being (not unlike Christianity at its best);karma yoga, experiencing divinity through everyday work and right actions; and raja yoga, involving the meditative practices you seem to be using to access that which is "separated from all qualities..without form,without a name.", which Shankara describes as "Thou before whom all words recoil", or as us Judeo-Christians prefer YHWH (That which is)--God the ineffable. This seems similar to Christian theologian Paul Tillich's Ground of Being,or Ultimate Meaning. As you say, it's difficult to love something so removed from reality, so Hinduism allows thinking of it as Ishvara or Bhagavan, the archetype of noblest reality. God, in this sense, is the sum of human idealism. God is Love. Namaste.

 

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Christianity is supposed to be LOVE. Many so called Christian's HATE because that's what they are taught. Jesus was a mystic, there are many of those.

 

^^You think people hate because that's what they were taught? So they're basically brainwashed?

 

I think that for many people hate is learned from their environment/those they are around. Even though hate was not taught in my own personal home, I was certainly around it in every other aspect of my life...I'm from the south. I learned that when you don't hate the people and things that those around you hate, you wind up in a world of hell and trouble. That is a fact.

That being said...I never changed the way I felt, although I did learn to be quiet about it WHEN I was growing up. Now not a one of the jackasses that harassed and harangued me as I grew up would dare face me nor utter a word questioning a thought or choice I ever made. lol

Its amazing what being an adult and having the ability to express myself has done for me in r/l.

 

Beautifully written. Good ideas to be found.

 

Ugh! The south. I'm never, ever going back there (save Miami).

Gosh! I'm so envious. I wish I wasn't such a pushover myself :/

 

I think you will be fine...just give yourself a few more years and you may be surprised what you're capable of saying and standing up for and doing.

Yeah the south is "special", right? :rofl: ...each day I get the "opportunity" for more character development. lol

 

I think hate is born out of fear. There are many in the media that play on fear and that promote hate. Not just in the States, but around the world. It's a quick and easy way to form a following and grow power.

 

Thanks for an intelligent response as usual. A lot there with which I wouldn't disagree.

When I brought up the idea of knowing God, it was something like the Indian concept of jnana I had in mind, which seems to be very similar to the western concept of gnosis - as a general idea, not limited to the historical gnostics. I know there is a current of gnosis which runs through some manifestations of Christianity.
I know you personally are a progressive, and I suppose it was the mass of non-progressive Christians I really had in mind. (there are conservatives in every tradition, it isn't limited to Christianity).

I think that where Hindu traditions offer something different it's partly on the level of techniques and partly philosophical. There's no reason though why someone who wants to be a Christian can't take advantage of both, if they are open minded enough. There's no real contradiction as God is God - the same for all.
Anyway, I'm all for the idea of people living their Christianity out in the everyday world. It's the only world we have, and it's that I think, that has to be changed, spiritualized, transformed,redeemed - whatever vocabulary you prefer.

The yogas you mention are all spoken of in the Bhagavad Gita, but more emphasis is placed on jnana (knowledge), bhakti (love/devotion) and karma, (action or works).
In actuality, all 3 form a kind of integral whole. You can't have any one in isolation. It's more a question of individual temperaments dictating a different point of departure, a different line of approach to the Divine. In my mind one of the great strengths of the Indian tradition is its plurality. Many different paths and approaches are included. Sometimes the way in which Christianity has been presented seems very exclusivist - although I'm not saying it all is or all shall ever be.
I myself practice devotion to Krishna as part of my path, which is in some ways similar to the way I suppose some Christians would approach Jesus Christ. I certainly find I can empathize with people on any serious kind of spiritual journey.

I'd have to say that I think God is far, far more than the sum of human idealism. I'd be happy to discuss further why I say this, but tonight I am tired and should probably leave it for now.

God is Love though - and that's perhaps the most important point on which we can agree.

Edit: quote 2 looks like I've redacted the content. It wasn't me but the HF system.