Quote:
Originally Posted by rubecube
Christians believe in not killing people, but yet millions of people have been killed in the name of Christianity. At what point do you say that not killing people is no longer a prerequisite to being a Christian?
|
I don't think not killing people was ever a pre-requisite of Christianity; the commandment is thou shalt not murder. Not that I want to get into litigating what makes a person a real Christian or anything, but my point is essentially, Christians may do things that aren't sanctioned by their ideology, but as long as those things aren't in conflict with that ideology, they don't reflect on the ideology itself.
To the extent the philosophy and the behaviour of its so-called adherents do conflict, then you've either got a Christian acting in an un-Christian manner (of which there are no shortage of examples), or a non-Christian who claims, or believes himself to be, a Christian, and isn't.
Similarly, if every person who ever subscribed to liberalism also subscribed to capitalism, this wouldn't suggest that liberalism mandates capitalism - you could simply have a situation where all the liberals also happened to be capitalists. For the same reason, if you called yourself an anti-capitalist liberal, that wouldn't be an oxymoron. However, if you said, "I'm a liberal but I don't think that people should be allowed to criticize the government because loyalty and order are more important than the ability to dissent", you're either failing to live up to liberal principles or you're not a liberal at all. The statement itself would be nonsensical.
A philosophy is independent of the people who claim to practice it. Otherwise the sentence "You think you're a liberal but you're behaving illiberally" wouldn't make any sense. If I could respond, "the fact that I think I'm a liberal makes my behaviour liberal", that would completely erase the concept of ideology.