Of all the various religions, Christianity has the most adherents. Yet, this fact is a bit deceiving as there are literally thousands of branches of Christian churches and denominations. Since they each originate from the same seed, it seems almost crazy that there are so many separate organizations. While they all tend to agree on a rather loose set of perspectives, there seems to be more points that they disagree on.
I live in a small rural county of approximately 20,000 people, yet there are scads of Christian churches here of every stripe and hue. Here's a list: Assemblies of God, Baptist, Baptist-Conservative, Southern Baptist, Bible Church, Catholic, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Episcopal, Jehovah Witness, Lutheran, Methodist, Nazarene, Pentecostal, Pentecostal-Church of God, Presbyterian, Seventh-Day Adventist, United Church of Christ, and Wesleyan. There are also several non-denominational churches plus several independent ones too. (Of course, this is a VERY abbreviated list.)
I'm sure the pastor of each church in the above list and many of the members of each congregation believe in their heart of hearts that their brand of the holy writ is the right one. If one of them is indeed correct, then it looks like all the rest of them are wrong.
Of course, I think each one of them is barking up the wrong tree in the wrong field. :-)
I live in a small rural county of approximately 20,000 people, yet there are scads of Christian churches here of every stripe and hue. Here's a list: Assemblies of God, Baptist, Baptist-Conservative, Southern Baptist, Bible Church, Catholic, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Episcopal, Jehovah Witness, Lutheran, Methodist, Nazarene, Pentecostal, Pentecostal-Church of God, Presbyterian, Seventh-Day Adventist, United Church of Christ, and Wesleyan. There are also several non-denominational churches plus several independent ones too. (Of course, this is a VERY abbreviated list.)
I'm sure the pastor of each church in the above list and many of the members of each congregation believe in their heart of hearts that their brand of the holy writ is the right one. If one of them is indeed correct, then it looks like all the rest of them are wrong.
Of course, I think each one of them is barking up the wrong tree in the wrong field. :-)
I've always been amused by apologists who argue for Christianity from a majority view: "Well, 2.7 billion people can't be wrong!" Leaving aside the fact that, yes, they can, since majority does not grant authority, you have to wonder how many of those 2.7 billion actually agree with one another.
ReplyDeleteIf you break them down into their component denominations (over 39,000 of them, possibly more) then Roman Catholics account for about 1.1 billion - so already the number is halved - but it seems that most Protestant denominations don't view the RCs as being "real" Christians anyway, so the largest unified (ish) block of Christians is the Baptists (with about 100 million adherents). That's only slightly ahead of Indigenous Tribal African Religions, and way behind, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. In a global context, if each religion was given a country of similar population, Baptists would be Mexico (Catholicism would be India).