By Whom Should A Religion Be Defined?

[Guest BackSlyder]

Question: Should a religion/denomination be defined by the person(s) who founded the religion/denomination, or should it be defined by those who follow/practice it?

[Antlerman]

Question: Should a religion/denomination be defined by the person(s) who founded the religion/denomination, or should it be defined by those who follow/practice it?

Interesting question. I would say that the fact that some founder's ideas were adopted by others would show that it is the followers who have the power to let it live or to kill it. But it's complex. A good marketing guru can create a market where none existed. In this case as long as the founder is alive and manipulating his market audience, the control would seem to mainly reside with him or her, but after they're gone, then the culture that still follows it owns it and controls it. The hiring and firing of the priests in charge of it will largely reside in the followers. But it's sort of a symbiotic relationship, of power giving and power taking.

 

People create and serve God, so God can in turn serve and create them.

[Carolyn the Red]

Question: Should a religion/denomination be defined by the person(s) who founded the religion/denomination, or should it be defined by those who follow/practice it?

 

Interesting. There's also the option of the religion being defined by some sort of "authority", like the pope, archbishop, whatever.

 

I would say that the religion should be defined by practice, and in the most broad way possible. Those who practice a religion shouldn't be able to restrict the religion to those followers most acceptable to them.

 

In that way, I would say Mormons and Catholics are Christian, splinter Catholic and Mormon groups are still Mormon or Catholic if they say they are (they have as much authority to define doctrine as the leaders of the larger groups, I'd say), Jews for Jesus can still call themselves Jewish, and an Anglican priest who admits to not believing in the literal divinity of Jesus is just as Anglican to me. About the only limits I'd put are clarity in labels...a self-proclaimed atheist who believes in a god isn't, and someone who says they're Christian but doesn't believe in a historical or metaphorical Jesus, and also doesn't follow anything labeled as a "teaching of Jesus" (no matter what provenance) pushes the limits of Christianity.

[ShackledNoMore]

And there's yet a 4th option available, too: external observers. An example would be those who deny adhering to any religion because, unlike all religious practitioners, THEY alone follow the REAL truth. Sects exist, such as the 2x2s, who won't even own up to a name for their sect.

[disEnchanted]

Christians are followers of Christ. For some reason, even christians label other christians as cults--Jehovah's Witnesses and Christadelphians are two examples. But aren't they christians too?

[Robbobrob]

Christians are followers of Christ. For some reason, even christians label other christians as cults--Jehovah's Witnesses and Christadelphians are two examples. But aren't they christians too?

That is the interesting thing. People like to define what other people believe ("they are not True Christians", "Hitler was not a Christian") but hate to be labeled by others. If Christians defeated every non-Jesus-believing group out there, they would just feed on each other.

[Lerato]

This doesn't really answer BackSlyder's original question, but I was just thinking about how the founders of Christianity - and by this I specifically refer to the New Testament writers - did a pretty piss poor job of defining the beliefs of their own religion and how they should be practiced. This put the onus on the believers to decide what appropriate beliefs were and naturally everyone had a different opinion. The Christian church has become increasingly fractured due to the increasing distance between Christian leaders and the time, place and context within which Christianity developed, starting with the New Testament writers who wrote many years after the death of the "founder" of Christianity Jesus Christ and who left large gaps in the historical record of his life along with plagarizing myths from other cultures and inserting them into the life of Jesus. The danger of having a personalized God is that everyone gives him the qualities that they see fit to give him and condemns anyone who thinks differently.