Your faith in relation to your GNR fandom

[Pinball Wizard]

Someone should do this with the members of GNR:

This?

[Eu4ic]

Well done

[Gunzen]

If you claim to be non religious, you believe in yourself... or money, or your abs, or women, or whatever. You still place something above everything else, as your reference point by which you navigate through reality. Whatever it is, that's your "God."

Therefore I openly claim myself as religious. I am a Christian. When I fall short and sin, its because I momentarily place something ahead of the God of my understanding.

And, reunion, on the right terms, would be great.

Also, I have no idea why Catholicism is disconnected from Christianity in this poll. That's why I didnt cast a vote on this poll. This is coming from somebody who's working on a Masters in Theology, if those kinds of credentials matter.

I think your "higher power" can be whatever you want. I agree with you. But Separating non denominational Christianity from Catholicism is fair to do. I don't have much experience in reading about of the denominations, but I am just gonna defer to your wisdom here though.

And I believe that Christianity is a belief, and not concerned in metaphysics, therefore not a religion. Christians are disciples in my opinion. Agree to disagree.

[ChristmasFnatic]

I am from the Philippines, and its a Catholic country(though a lot are retarded hypocrite/Bible thumpers). But I support both Axl and Slash, so didnt vote on that.

[Eu4ic]

If you claim to be non religious, you believe in yourself... or money, or your abs, or women, or whatever. You still place something above everything else, as your reference point by which you navigate through reality. Whatever it is, that's your "God."

Therefore I openly claim myself as religious. I am a Christian. When I fall short and sin, its because I momentarily place something ahead of the God of my understanding.

And, reunion, on the right terms, would be great.

Also, I have no idea why Catholicism is disconnected from Christianity in this poll. That's why I didnt cast a vote on this poll. This is coming from somebody who's working on a Masters in Theology, if those kinds of credentials matter.

I think your "higher power" can be whatever you want. I agree with you. But Separating non denominational Christianity from Catholicism is fair to do. I don't have much experience in reading about of the denominations, but I am just gonna defer to your wisdom here though.

And I believe that Christianity is a belief, and not concerned in metaphysics, therefore not a religion. Christians are disciples in my opinion. Agree to disagree.

I tend to think Jesus makes metaphysical claims: He is the one through all things were made, for example. He is the first and last, Alpha and Omega, and all of those things. All those "I am.." statements he makes illustrate that, I think. But to your point, I think we discover God ultimately through sacrificing ourselves and helping others, not through metaphysical ponderings.

Discipleship is part of religion, imo. Look at cults like Jim Jones' or Waco Texas. Those people were disciples, and I definitely say that they illustrate the ugly side of religion. Communist Russia was a devout culture (religious, imo) yet claimed not to be religious at all, and I think that part of why it was peculiarly evil. Same goes for Mao's "cultural revolution" in China; Pol Pot in Cambodia. Nazism claimed to be doing God's work yet clearly the impetus was the personality of Hitler. That's who the Germans' faith was in. When a society treats something like the state or a person as a savior, despite that person or thing not being all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, then the society should expect problems.

Finally, Jesus definitely made scathing critiques of religion, especially in Mark for example, which contemporary scholarship holds to be the oldest of the gospels and the one the others were based off of. This is part of what makes Jesus so cool. Unfortunately, yes, He's been exploited by worldly power structures for their purposes. But our resurrection faith means that the exploitation we see all around the world, on so many levels, is not the final word. Good ultimately prevails. Jesus is the one who delivers us from evil, according to my faith.

[SoulMonster]

But Separating non denominational Christianity from Catholicism is fair to do.

It is all a matter of definition: how different must two belief sets be before they are classified as different religions? Many Christians would just refer to all the various denominations of Christianity as slight differences within one religion, to emphasize their recent common origin and to appear more powerful, others would define them as separate religions based on theistic differences and disparaging doctrine and consider Christianity as sort on an "umbrella religion" or "mega-religion". We all have to have a threshold somewhere defining where one set of beliefs warrants to be considered a unique, separate religion. In my opinion, if the religious differences are large enough for believers to wage war on each other, which has happened numerous times between different Christian denominations, then they are different religions.