In your opinion is it acceptable for someone to go to church when they do things that go against the religion? Ive been to church once so I'm really clueless which is why I am asking these few questions.. OK so someone told me that Christians don't believe in dancing or drinking (amongst other things but I am just using these 2 as examples) but for some christian people it's acceptable and to some christian people it is not. How is there different levels of Christianity? Shouldn't they all follow the same set of beliefs?? I don't get how exceptions are made with religion.. Or is that even true??? Im not making this to start any arguments, these are just some random thoughts I've had lately.. I honestly don't understand, that is why Im asking..
OK first of all Christianity is not like other religions, so you can't start out with the premise Christianity=Religion. Anyway, there aren't levels of Christianity as much as there are splinter groups within Christianity. Christ lived as a rabbi and taught a lot of philosophical and religious things and his followers started a cult around him, all within the context of Judaism at that point. Then non-Jews became involved and the movement came to be a church, a separate religious movement than Judaism. So at the fall of the Roman empire Christianity became the legal, official state relgion of Rome and later Europe. So what was before an underground movement with slightly different beliefs at each cell, Christianity became a dominant weathy entity. That dominant entity was the Catholic Church. It chose which books to include as sacred scripture, outlined basic dogma and further cemented certain beliefs. For political reasons early on, the Orthodox church broke away from the Roman Catholic church but the two sides generally held the same beliefs and were not unfriendly that I know of. Because the church was by the middle ages the secular authority in Europe was well as religious it grew very wealthy and corrupt. A monk named Martin Luther tried to reform the Church but because his ideas were findamentally different than what the church had always believed it denounced him as a heretic and he formed his own church-the Protestant church. The protestant church spread through Europe because they advocated teaching people in there own languages and printing Bibles in the local vernacular (Rome used Latin). The protestant church has since split into some 2,000 factions. The Anglican or Episcopalian church is protestant in that it isnt really catholic but it is from a separate movement than Luther's. Each little faction holds different beliefs than the next. Some must live in utter simplicity, like the Amish, some are not allowed to have sex at all (the Shakers who died out because they didn't procreate), some follow Luther's teachings-the LUtherans, some follow his disciple John Calvin's -the Presbyterians. Modern Evangelicalism and the Fundamentalism that rose in the 1700s are huge in America though both are modern philosophies that don't really espouse things Christianity ever did in the past. Anyway, I guess I thought giving you the whole history of Christianity was necessary, lol, for you to understand the answers to your question.
