• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Is Catholicism a Christian religion ?

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
When was the Biblical canon codified?
There is actually not a single Biblical canon - different Christian denominations accept different books of the Bible as canonical.

Martin Luther famously demoted several books of the Old Testament that had heretofore been accepted as canonical to "apocryphical" or "deuterocanonical" status, for example.

The Latin speaking branch of the Christian Church (what would later become the Roman Catholic denomination after the Great Schism with Greek Orthodoxy) came onto its early canon with the Council of Rome in 382 AD, but only with Council of Trent 1545-1563 AD did the Church affirm its canon as definitive in the doctrinal sense.
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
Christianity is a theological buffet. It's a set of religious belief where the customer can pick and choose whatever looks tasty, and leave the rest. If you are liberal you will select more tolerant options, and if conservative you'll pick more authoritative and restrictive options. This is why there's some 41,000 sects of Christianity, all claiming the truth.
 

Ashoka

श्री कृष्णा शरणं मम
I feel like even though I'm not Catholic anymore, I find myself defending it against evangelical protestants.

Me: I'm not Catholic anymore and I have problems with what they believe

Also me when someone says something mean about Mary: First the heck of all...
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
I feel like even though I'm not Catholic anymore, I find myself defending it against evangelical protestants.

Me: I'm not Catholic anymore and I have problems with what they believe

Also me when someone says something mean about Mary: First the heck of all...
I am a relentless critic of the CC in my private offline life, so my biggest beef with Evangelical criticisms of Catholicism is that they're criticizing the Church for all the wrong reasons.
 

Viker

Häxan
I feel like even though I'm not Catholic anymore, I find myself defending it against evangelical protestants.

Me: I'm not Catholic anymore and I have problems with what they believe

Also me when someone says something mean about Mary: First the heck of all...
I'm no where near Catholic. But I respect them. And I don't care much for hateful BS.
 

Clara Tea

Well-Known Member
Mostly all forms of Christianity including Jehovah's Witnesses are a mix of all three because the New Testament itself is a product of the mix of Jewish, Greek and Roman concepts in my opinion.

And, earlier, the Jewish religion was apparently influenced by the concepts of Norse Gods, according to some sources.
 

Clara Tea

Well-Known Member
But the ultimate winners among the Christian factions were the ones who followed Paul in renouncing the covenant of circumcision and declaring that the Jewish god had changed [his] mind and didn't want to be just a tribal God any more.
Such a God is in this context a Christian invention. The Jewish God is still there, still God of the Jews.

Jesus was Jewish, and believed in the Jewish God. The Christian religion spun off of the Jewish religion, and shares the same God. Jesus brought a new message from God to new people. The old message to Jews was "eye for an eye" (though "thou shalt not kill" was part of the 10 commandments and were brought down from the mountain by Moses as rules for Jews) and the new message to Christians is "turn the other cheek." This is because Christians, in modern times, have nuclear bombs, so if they are hot headed idiots and make wars against the wrong people (such as the war in Iraq), they could do serious damage. God sees the future and knows what mistakes humans can make.

In addition to restraining the violence of Christians, God released them from the requirement of a bris and dietary restrictions. Though the bris is a good idea, even in modern times, because it is more sanitary. In modern times, with refrigeration, and better medicines, pork restrictions are not as necessary.

So, religiously, Christians are Jews, but without the restrictions, and the Christian God is the Jewish God. Ethnically, of course, Christians are not Jews (but Arabs are Semitic, just as Jews are).
 

Sand Dancer

Crazy Cat Lady
the Catholic religion is a product of at least three religious traditions: Biblical Christianity, Greek philosophy and the pagan religions of the Middle East and Europe.

Most religions are an amalgam of previous religion in the area where they were started. And when a religion comes to another region, it's influenced by the religions that are already there. Basically we are, and religions are, mutts.
 

Sand Dancer

Crazy Cat Lady
Hi,
That is an interesting interpretation.
Jehovah never claimed to be only a tribal God. He simply stated that he wasn't one.
After all He created the universe, and He says that He does not change.

But he was a tribal god; the Hebrew god. Most gods back then in that area were tribal. The problem was when he was universalized at the expense of the other gods and their adherents.
 

Secret Chief

nirvana is samsara
In many countries where Catholicism is the primary denomination, the locals use 'Christian' and 'Catholic' interchangeably. I know this for fact about northern Sri Lanka and South India. It's most likely true in much of South America as well.
I'm guessing if you're not a Catholic in Italy, you're probably a Satanist :)
 

metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
The question: If above is true, can Catholics claim to be true Christians ?
And how many times do we run across such nonsensical garbage like this here?

OK, let me turn the tables on you: prove to us that you actually are a human being.
 
Top