Yeah, but even Chinese makes a distinction. (天主教 vs 基督教) Usually Christian tends to refer to Non-Catholic followers of Christ, such as Protestants.
@Hanna I did live with a rabbi for a while with his family. Turning on and off the light during Shabbat lol.
You gotta get hip with this thread. The ones getting kicked out of the Christian club are the Mormons.
Protestants and Catholics may be and feel quite distinct from one another, but in the end they are still technically all Christians.
Catholics mean universal. They were the universal church for Christians before the Protestant reformation.
Hadn’t the Byzantines and Russians gone their separate way before that?
No, that only happened a couple of weeks ago (over Ukraine). You may be thinking of the Great Schism, which happened a thousand years ago, and involved the Eastern and Western Roman Empire. (Eastern = Byzantine)
That’s what I was referring to. Byzantines and Russians going their separate ways from the Romans a thousand years back. (But I’m not sure which one gets the term Orthodox, or if they’re both Orthodox, or where Nestorian fits in, so I opted for “Byzantines and Russians”.)
EDIT: Oh what the hell, may as well throw in the point that some of the Protestant movements complained that Catholicism was polytheist - not just the trinity, but also Mary and all the saints. Islam has said the same, I’m not sure how often.
The nature of God is a petty dispute?
Believing in monotheism and polytheism is a pretty big discrepancy.
Look at it from my viewpoint. It’s just some arbitrary and impossible to understand detail that only got hashed out long after the guy lived. Is it big to you and other Christians? Sure, I get that. The church got split several times over that stuff, and not in a happy friendly way, more akin to the Shiite-Sunni split now. On the other hand, Jesus lived and taught and his teachings and some much more basic and essential doctrines were recorded in some fashion. As long as you recognize those basics, I’m not going to trouble myself about arcane distinctions. Again it may mean a lot to you, but again, you haven’t convinced me that I should care about it, no.
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How about everyone agree to agree that there are various types of Christians. The word Christian simply means a believer in Christ. As many of you pointed out, not all denominations agree on one core beliefs system…ie a singular Trinity in spirit or a separate Trinity with 3 entities who have a shared purpose.
So…being fair to the Latter Day Saints, the Jehovah Witness etc etc, they too are Christian in the basic sense of Christianity.
Personally I think it’s all crazy talk anyways. We all know Aliens seeded the Earth millions of years ago. Actually, when you think of it…God would be an alien…would he not? 
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I know virtually nothing about the beliefs of the Mormons, but I guess you’re talking about this:
–Robert L. Millet and Noel B. Reynolds, “Do Latter-day Saints believe that men and women can become gods?” website of the Maxwell Institute, Brigham Young University
https://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1090&index=6
I’m no Bible expert, either, but I wonder if the above idea was influenced by this:
Edited to add:
Apologies to Dawud for missing this.
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Depending on what you mean by believe, this definition could easily include Muslims - they believe that Jesus was one of the most important prophets.
EDIT: But to be honest a lot of this echoes my dim recollections of “One True Scotsman” fallacies.
基督教 is actually christian, not protestantism. 新教 or 基督新教 is actually the proper term for protestantism. but in normal usage, i’ve noticed that the former is often used for non-catholic christians, probably because ppl like dropping characters from words, and 新 got dropped. but 天主教 are still considered part of 基督教 in technical usage.
Hey, people becoming god and also Mormons believe God was a man just like us and became a god from another god. There are basically an infinite amount of gods in Mormonism. Also forgot about they believe in mother god. I believe they got this from the words of Joseph smith, and in the Book of Mormon and not from anything the New Testament said. Unless Joseph smith read those verses and misunderstood them.
I don’t know those verses well. But if I had to guess without much research. I’d put my money on the original text not being translated well in English. There were many words for god in Greek and 1 in English so. Like one word for love in English, but in Greek there are many. In some places the Bible says “agape” which means godly unconditional love. Other philos meaning brotherly love. Eros for sexual lustful love. And a couple others you can look up. They have very different meaning but all get translated to love in English so the meaning gets lost. I remember having to learn quite a bit of Greek and comparing translations to fully understand many verses.
Big-O Orthodox Christians also accept that ordinary believers may attain divinization (theosis), but hold that unlike God, who is divine in his essence, they would be divine by grace.
Everyone thinks they are little-o orthodox (having “right belief”), just as several churches consider themselves to be little-c catholic (“universal”). But in order for people to know which church to go to, “Catholic” has been informally ceded to the Catholics, and “Orthodox” to the Byzantines/Greeks, Russians, etc.
The “Nestorians” (they don’t like that word, nowadays they’re called the Assyrian Church of the East) split with the other groups after the second ecumenical council (I Constantinople), i.e. they rejected the third (Ephesus), although some say it is all a big misunderstanding based on translation issues. The Armenians and Copts accept the third but reject the fourth (Chalcedon). The Orthodox accept seven, more or less (skipping over Crete). The Catholics have a couple dozen more, most recently Vatican II.
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Ancient Greek has six distinct words for love…
Porneia, moicheia, aselgeia, akatharsia, arsenokoitai, and malakia!
Well , some of those refer to different descriptions of the sexual act really.
Is it just me or has Andrew become much more argumentative since he moved to, wherever he moved to?
Catholics venerate the Virgin Mary as the Mother of God. This is equally outside core Christian beliefs since it implies not a trinity but a quaternity. But Catholics are still classed as Christians.
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This is indeed confusing
There were incredible splits and fighting over that as well! The recriminations over it were so intense that no common effort was possible against the Islamic takeover of major Christian centers.
In my experience a lot of Protestants I came across pointed to this when they were looking for a reason to exclude Catholics from the club.
I always liked that part of Catholicism. Why not give Mary some credit? It’s not easy to be a mom, especially when you have to see your son suffer and die for humanity’s sins.
I also enjoyed reading about the saints. It was like collecting baseball cards.