In Reply to: Re: All Christians in general posted by Thinker on December 11, 2009 at 04:09:02:
It seems there are two different things. YOur original post talked about the behavior of people commonly identified as christians and I am taking about beliefs directly extracted from the Bible (and which are not necessarily common among the majority of christians).
In fact, I suspect that somebody may have done a study somewhere about the "common ground" of beliefs among different christian denominations. I would say that plotting number of common beliefs on number of denominations, we would find a normal with a large standard deviation and big average-mean.
My explanation would be that all christian churches only have common beliefes on the few basic tenets but starts diverging on how they interpret them. Interpretation leads to those differentiating beliefs, and the vast majority of church members will have different beliefs according to the churches they go to.
In my opinion, only the few common beliefs can be categorized as solidly Christian, the rest in hog-wash, and leads to the majority of their behavior.
Therefore saying that christians behave this way or that way will refer mainly to those fringe beliefs and may not even be distinguishable from the behavior of the general population. I am sure a better choice of words to explain these results than generalizing such beliefs to all christians.
Having said this, your statement: "This is part of what I see as the problem. It is this very separation between spiritual and the natural/physical realms which establishes a dualism of man vs. nature. Christians see salvation exclusively as an other world reality, which is immeasurably more important than earthly life."
I can see how this is problematic for some people on the point of "salvation", whatever that is, but I don't see it as a competition "man vs. nature". I can't speak for all who consider themselves spiritual but my particular take on that is that the spiritual man is part of nature, not its competitor.
By the same token and based on the same data of the article, my conclusion would have been that shallow christianity is not spiritual, and therefore enemy of nature. But that is something that we already knew.