C is for Christian

Audience of One is the weblog of Matthew Weston, a UK student, Christian, technophile and musician.

Home / 2005 / March

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It’s an obvious choice for the letter C, but I’ve already written about what I believe elsewhere on this site. To do something different, this entry will have to take a different slant, so I thought I’d go into more detail about what Christians are and what Christians aren’t.

Firstly, being British doesn’t make you a Christian. People claim that the UK is a Christian country, and so if you’re British you’re nominally Christian. It’s a load of rubbish. A lot of emphasis is placed in the Bible on it being an individual’s choice to become a Christian. To be a Christian you must accept that you’ve messed up and that Christ’s death for you cleanses you from all wrongdoing, then commit your life to him. Those who haven’t done all of the above cannot rightly call themselves Christians.

Secondly, Christians are not homophobic, sexist or warmongers. You will get those who call themselves Christians (and may well be – only God knows what’s in their hearts) who are homophobic, or violent, or misogynistic, or many terrible things. They might even claim that it comes from their faith. They are wrong. The Bible is clear that we should love one another (which includes homosexuals); it’s clear that we should not be violent (and I won’t get into the just war debate); it’s also clear that everyone is equal (Gal 3:28). This doesn’t mean that it’s okay to be a practising homosexual (just as it’s not okay to be a practising adulterer), or that men and women have exactly the same roles (it’s clear from the Bible we were created to complement each other rather than mimic each other), but that showing any kind of hatred, dislike or differing attitude based on gender or sexual orientation is unbiblical and hence not Christian.

Thirdly, Christians are sinners. A common misconception (and one unfortunately reinforced by Christians) is that Christians are all perfect and we look down on those who aren’t. This is also unbiblical: we’re reminded frequently in the Bible that we are all sinners. Christians are just as likely to sin as others, but often the Christians are the ones noticeably doing something about it – hence the misconceptions.

Finally, Christians are divided. There are many different denominations, none of which I feel I belong to. Different denominations often have different styles of meetings, difference emphases on different things and are sometimes plain wrong. Then within the denominations you have different groups again, such as the traditionalists, evangelicals or liberals. It gets confusing, but you often can’t assume that people are true Christians, even if they go to church (or lead a church). Some whole churches can be completely dead. Often churches are filled with non-Christians who just don’t understand what it means to be a Christian and so think they are one.

I’m a Christian. I’m not homophobic, sexist or violent, but I am a sinner – I mess up all the time. I’m a Christian because I choose to be, not because I was born that way. (I’m also a Christian because God chose me to be, but that’s another matter.) I’m not a Baptist, an Anglican or a Methodist. I’m a Christian.

Matthew @ 22:14, March 19, 2005 to ABC | Comments (11)

Comments:

Mr E

Does UK really need a grey line?

Comment added at 22:53, March 19, 2005

Matthew

Do you mean, “does the abbreviation ‘United Kingdom’ need to be specified when it’s so obvious what it stands for?” or “what’s that grey line doing there?” If the former, think about people with screen readers having it read out as “ukk” otherwise. If the latter, hover your mouse over it and see the tooltip appear…

Comment added at 08:50, March 20, 2005

Mr E

My question was the former. The vocalisation software on my computer reads it as UK. In fact, most words written in capitals will be read out letter by letter, except for some common ones which it can recognise. Even if some people’s computers do read it as “uck” it’s still blatently obvious from the context that it is referring to the UK. “…the UK is a Christian country.” It’s not as if the word “uck” exists, and there is certainly only one country whose name may be pronounced that way.

Comment added at 15:54, March 20, 2005

Matthew

Some words all in capitals shouldn’t be read out by initials. HTML differentiates between the two by having the abbr tag for those that are read out letter by letter (like the UK) and the acronym tag for those that are read out like words (e.g. CAT or PET scans). You mark them up differently so the screen reader knows how to cope. And just because it’s obvious from the context doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. We still capitalise the UK even though it’d be obvious from the context what we meant if we said the uk.

Comment added at 16:13, March 20, 2005

Mr E

So if you’ve marked it up right you won’t get any “uck”s, then, and a definition is probably not necessary.

However, I can see you’re just trying to consistent by underlining every abbreviation or acronym (however obvious), and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Comment added at 16:38, March 20, 2005

Sheepie

Marking it up right means he gets the underline whether he likes it or not, so why not have a definition, just so hovering over it does something?

Comment added at 16:45, March 20, 2005

Matthew

Exactly. You mark it up so the screen reader does it right, and then you give a definition so that the underline is there for a purpose. (The thing is, I only mark up the first occurance on the page which almost defeats the point – I should really do it whenever it appears. I need to find a way of doing it automatically though, and all the plugins I’ve found treat abbr and acronym indescriminately.

Comment added at 07:49, March 21, 2005

Mr E

I don’t use a screen reader as such, but as I mentioned above SimpleText will read out most capitalised words letter by letter without being told whether they are abbreviations, acronyms or just normal words written in capitals, particularly if they would be difficult to pronounce as words, e.g. HTML.

Other people’s software may work differently, though.

Comment added at 14:22, March 21, 2005

Matthew

Well, you see, this is the point – it can’t distinguish between acronyms, initialisms and abbreviations :)

Comment added at 19:58, March 21, 2005

Rory

Okay, here comes the pedagogue.

An abbreviation is basically anything that is shortened. So “i.e.”, “NASA”, “NHS”, “app”, and “flu” are all abbreviations of longer things. It’s a general definition. An initialism is any multi-word phrase where (almost) only the first letter of each word is used, for example “NASA” and “NHS”, and “i.e.” An acronym is the same, but the end result is readable as a word and not as initials, such as “NASA”, and “FACT”.