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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

You are falling to No true Scotsman aka appeal to purity fallacy with religion.

Christianity is defined by Christians not how others interpret the bible. Different Christians define it differently. There is no one real way to be Christian.

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Agreed, but aren't there ways not to be a Christian?

What Janet Wilkerson is doing goes against every quote I've heard in the Bible about Jesus. Love thy neighbor, do unto others as others would do unto you and more.

Christianity has a code of ethics, they vary by interpretation, but what Wilkerson is doing is so out of the mainstream that I'm giving her a red card. Same with Westboro Baptists and the other televangelists that cloak themselves in religion as a tool to rake in cash.

It's a religion, it's based on a work of fiction. Everyone can gatekeep it to their liking, that doesn't mean they are right. You said it yourself, it all depends on interpretation.

> Christianity has a code of ethics [citation needed], they vary by interpretation

There are only Cafeteria Christians. Their bible has been finely tuned to be full of interpretation, contradiction, and weirdness. Nothing resembling a cohesive doctrine can be formed without picking and choosing the parts you like and completely ignoring the parts that go against it.

I mean, for a couple of centuries, one of mainstream Christianity’s big things, perhaps its _defining_ thing, was invading Palestine and doing extremely nasty things to the locals when they won (and not just to Muslims and Jews; local Christians, being the Wrong Sort of Christian, also didn’t fare well). And that was all, at the time, basically accepted as compatible with Christianity.

Today, virtually no Christian would be okay with the Crusades, and certainly wouldn’t think of what was done as being compatible with Christianity. Christianity’s been historically extremely malleable, and what Jesus said has rarely been all that big a part of it for most Christians.

Is it still a "no true Scotsman" when you are talking about the central feature of something?

Like, literally, claiming somebody is not a true Scotsman because he is not from Scotland is still a fallacy?

So if you're a Protestant, and a Catholic says you're not a proper christian because difference in religious dogma who's right? What about Jews for Jesus? Is a Christian defined by his faith or his acts?

These things are all up for debate.

To attack your metaphor: Is he a true Scotsman when both his parents are scottish and he was born just a wee bit over the border?

Well, if you disagree with the one central dogma of christianism, it's pretty much the case that you are not christian. It's not the case that your scottish was born just over the border, it's that his family is from Madagascar and he was born there.

Otherwise, what is giving that group of people a name even good for? It's like somebody claiming to be democrat, as long as all the law is written by a single person, or marxist, as long as commerce and private ownership are preserved.

But my point is exactly that: the "central dogma" doesn't exist. Is it essential dogma that gays will not get into heaven? Yes, and also no, depending on the denomination.

When you get a billion people creating hundreds(thousands?) of factions, there are no unifying ideas that bind everyone. I mean the council of Nicea had to happen for exactly this reason.

"Thou shall not kill/murder" is a commandment, and yet the crusades were allowed to happen because of the interpretation of what "kill/murder" means.

Christianity is not a monolith, and the book can be used to justify all sorts of things that other people would feel goes entirely against the core of the faith.

There's no true Scotsmen here because Scotland is a state of mind and not anything absolute.

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