How many religons are there?

R0ot

Im not sure if a thread like this already exsists but hey ill ask anyway. So im thinking how many actual religons or belief structures there are out there?

Another Question i have is : What is the difference in beliefs between, born again christians, fundamentalist christians, and christianity, if there is any difference.

hawkmoon269

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I'll leave it to someone better informed to answer the second question.

Excelsior

There is no agreed definition of religion, so in a very real way, your question in unanswerable.

Christianity is used very loosely and it can mean anything from "being a good person" out to its more accurate usage which means someone who believes the claims Jesus made about himsef- ie that Jesus is God.

Christianity is split into lots of different branches- in Ireland they fall into two broad categories: Roman Catholicism on one side and what are commonly (and technically incorrectly) referred to as "Protestant" on the other. The main "Protestant" churches in Ireland are the Church of Ireland, Methodists, Presbyterian and Baptist churches.

Other major branches that aren't so strong here are the Orthodox and Coptic churches and Pentecostalism. Around the world and in Ireland, there are also lots of independent churches which most often have an evangelical theology.

Each of these different churches all agree on the primary core truths of Christianity but they may express them differently or have secondary emphases. These differences are not negligible but they have to be warped to make them appear as problems between the churches. For example, Presbyterian churches approach theology from a Calvinistic stand-point. Methodists take a different view of how Christ's work actually functions in the world and that theology is called Arminianism. A Calvinist and an Arminian can get into deadly debates that last hours, but they both believe the same thing and they would be discussing how best to express and explain that thing.

Born again Christian is a phrase derived from chapter 3 in John's Gospel. A Jewish leader of high standing comes to Jesus under the cover of darkness and asks him what he has to do to gain eternal life. Jesus says, be "born again". He then explains that to be his follower one must have a spiritual rebirth, a conversion, a point where you decide to follow. So according to Jesus himself, all Christians have got to be born-again Christians.

In Ireland, that phrase is often used to refer to Christians with an evangelical theology. Evangelicalism is pretty much the dominant expression of Christianity across the world today and the churches that are growing in Ireland are evangelical in approach. One can view Christianity evangelically independent of your church- so there are evangelical Coptics and Roman Catholics and Presbyterians. So born again is not a very useful term for talking about Christians- since Christ says the Christian can be marked by their born-again-edness.

Finally, fundamentalism began in 1913 out of a movement by the Calvinist theologians at Princeton in America to publish easy-to-read books that described the core beliefs that represented the whole complete Christian church through the previous 1850 years. It was an ambitious project and was received amazingly well. Back then, fundamentalism would have been a term that had the same positive and negative virtues associated to it as evangelical has today.

Yet in the 1920s the American evangelical churches took a turn down a dark alleyway from which they haven't yet fully recovered. "Creation science" rose to prominence and evangelical America fell into its Dark Ages with the famous Scopes Trial. Over the next 30 years fudamentalist began to be associated with the kind of hypocritical Christianity that bred racial hatred laws, that quietly supported Fascism and that gathered wealth into itself while people starved.

The evangelical church started coming out of it in America in the late 50s and 60s with the influence of European theologians and popular writers like John Stott and CS Lewis. Martin Luther King, Billy Graham, Jimmy Carter and Francis Schaeffer are some of the very good examples of Christians who rose to prominence. But the damage to the term fundamentalist had been done.

So now fundamentalists differ from the rest of the church by reading the Bible entirely literally, what their intellectuals would call "a plain reading" and disdaining of archeology, history or textual criticism when approaching the Bible texts. This is not the way the Bible was ever meant to be read- the Jews never read their Scriptures that way and the early Christian fathers never treated the then new New Testament that way.

I could rant about it for hours, but I hope that this helps you understand some of the distinctions.

R0ot

Well if you want to rant man go right ahead im all ears, (or eyes as it may be on the web) That really helped alot thanks.

Dades

Interesting stuff. Nice one Excelsior.

Gazza22

The Atheist wrote:

Interesting stuff. Nice one Excelsior.

Yeah, one thing i like about that guy...he really goes deep when posting