Christian Identity

[eltrevo]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Identity

I found this while surfing Wikipedia about Christianity, and I think that it has some interesting points worth bringing up here.

[Sétanta]

Interesting...and somewhat frightening. These are the people that give Christianity a bad name.

[Tom Paine]

Let's be honest here. Christian Identity is a basic offshoot which is naturally produced by any religion; all religion produces radical and fundamentally "evil" offshoots, when we judge them by the standards of the religion they claim to profess. Why is it a surprise that Christianity does the same?

[ENSAIS]

Yeah, instead of saying "Christian", use... American. Or German.

An "American Identity" group offshoot... gives Americans a bad name.. scary right? Also statistically inconsequential. Same thing with "German Identity" group..until you are referring to say the Nazi party circa 1939 in Germany.

My only point is to look at tiny, inconsequential groups as just that. Rather than bring them up as a scarecrow to sully an entire group that largely has nothing to do with said tiny group.

But this DOES seem popular on the boards... Jesus Camp thread, this thread, --they kind of throw out a spectacular but miniscule example of some freaky way out of character group--and use it as a springboard to invite commentary about a much larger group (usually Christianity, Islam, or faith in general) to by implication say that the larger group really can be defined by the same out there behaviors.

What I would find more constructive is a sociological context. For example I had raised on many occasions when I was at university in Canada and faced with accusatory Canadian critiques of excessess of the US (and so generalization about the US in genereal) the concept of a bell curve with standard deviations. If you have a large population... standard deviation will result in tiny fractions of the society beeing at ends of the spectrum. In a population 10x larger (the US), expect the extreemes to be even farther and more extreeme. Not due to wierdness of the larger (US) total sample, but just as social descriptor of increased deviation in a much increased sample.

Only when behaviors within a sample group have a genuine correllation with that group (e.g. only members of that group do the behavior/ have the belief, and a significant % [say 5% plus?] can be regularly identified with the behavior) does raising the red flag as you have done seem legitimate to me.

But hey, do what you want. It's the nature of the net to be able to find whatever obscure example we want and use it as a defamatory critique of entire groups with little proof and no accountability...

[Tom Paine]

: Excess in America is far more than 5% of the population... but anyway, on topic, how do we define excess/radicalism in this instance? One could define the Catholic Church like that, or many Southern Baptist denominations like the Westboro Baptists...

[eltrevo]

: Excess in America is far more than 5% of the population... but anyway, on topic, how do we define excess/radicalism in this instance? One could define the Catholic Church like that, or many Southern Baptist denominations like the Westboro Baptists...

Yeah, not to mention the Pentecoastals. And a lot of Evangelicals. (Billy Graham, im watching you.)