nobspeople wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:32 pmI'd say if they follow the christian lifestyle, that's a good start. But ultimately, it doesn't matter. A person can call themselves a christian and if you don't think they are, so what? Watcha' gonna' do?!?
This reminds me of a time in my life when I was a teenager and my crazy mother called herself a different religion every few months or so, while understanding, as far as I know, none of the material. I never believed in the supernatural but I had this idea that she was somehow dishonouring those religions. As you say though, whatcha gonna do?
One day she said she was a Jew. Despite the fact that my family took her side, I thought I had her. My only friend at the time was a neo-Nazi, so I knew that either you are born to a mother who is a Jew, or you go through a conversion process and prove you understand the material. I called BS at this point, because I wanted her to stop. She'd now said she was a Taoist, a Buddhist, a Muslim (which I believe also has a conversion process which at least involves promising you won't then convert away), a JW, a follower of the Aztec religion, a Santerian, and some other things I can't even remember.
This was before the internet so I went and got literature from a synagogue on conversion. This didn't faze her at all, she continued to just say she was whatever she wanted without doing anything necessary to convert, her parents supported her, and I was left with the hard-earned realisation that while some organisations can indeed put up barriers to entry, they still have no earthly way to stop random people from saying they belong to those organisations.
