Separating Good Christianity from Bad Christianity


While I'm not a believer, I have opinions about "good" and "bad" practices in the faith. Of course, so does everyone else. I had never thought of looking at good and bad Christianity the way the link author see it. 

He was brought up in the Plymouth Brethren. This denomination is often thought of as a cult, he says, but it is not. The faith is about living a simple life that follows what the faith finds in the Bible. It is not, he says, fighting governments about meeting for church because it is the responsibility to individual people to find their way through life and it is not imperative to lean on friends or preachers. The link author is now a Unitarian but thinks the Brethren still represent a branch of the "good" religion.

In the U.S. founding document is this famous sentence, "...endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Religions that violate this sentence, the author says, are bad religions. Of course, those who uphold are good ones.

Plymouth Brethren, he says, are very conservative. But they stay in their own lane. They do not go about advocating publicly taking away rights of others, i.e., depriving others of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 

By his, and my, definition of a bad religion is one that advocates taking away any one of the three above. If, for example, a religion tries to reinstate laws against interracial marriage it would be taking away liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It would be the same for gay marriage.

Religious advocacy of laws which limit access to abortion fall in the category of bad religion. Being so against abortion one avoids it herself is not violating the three above. Taking abortions away from others leaves a religion in the bad category.   

Comments

  1. HenryDecember 8, 2020 at 8:14 AM

    "Taking abortions away from others leaves a religion in the bad category."

    Under current prevailing law, abortion is dependent on one's personhood being determined by others and their quest for right to privacy. Life can be diminished due to another's quest for privacy. With that diminishment of one of the "any one of the three above", does that make a "bad religion" for those who advocate that diminishment of life? It seems the way the argument has been structured (not by me), you have competing values. More life=less pursuit of happiness. More pursuit of happiness=less life. Plus one has to inject right to privacy, not part of the three-legged-stool, into that zero sum game. It seems like you have an end-goal, and you are arranging and sometimes contorting and/or overlooking some or all of the three principals to achieve your goal.

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