Ah, ok. Well yes, that’s my question.
Well, it’s not my perception, only. Bridging the gap between academia and industry is a common concern of policy-makers, who want a return on their money invested in accademia. Not all science can be turned in practical applications, and not all technological progress is due to accademic research. But that’s probably stating the obvious. Point and examples well taken. Why am i agruing this point again?
And my answer would be that the label is all that it is. We create the label but the label itself is empty. Depending on which aspects going into our conception of the label that we choose to emphasize, that is how we understand the symbol. For myself, I emphasize the social aspect of social labels (like religious affiliation), so one is a member of such-and-such a religion if the communities of relevance consider them to have that label. That militia identifies itself as Christian (an important consideration for how we ought apply labels) and those in contact with the militia also consider them to be Christians (the other important half of the equation). How this relates to some idealized conception of Christianity is irrelevant – unless that particular conception holds enough sway in the popular consciousness to define what it is to be Christian. Since they are considered to be Christian by the community-at-large, that doesn’t apply here.
but i bet there are many Christians that would object to the militia calling itself “Christian” - how broad reaching is the community of relevance?
clearly to many people the term “Christian” is more than just a label of affiliation - isn’t it still possible that the militia is by definition not Christian, despite what some may believe it to be?
maybe Christian is like a genre label - and arguing over wether or not the militia was in fact Christian is like arguing over wether or not Eraserhead was a horror movie - it’s objectively indeterminate, perhaps
I’m skeptical that those Christians would represent a majority, or even a sizable minority of Christians. While Google does not represent a rigorous sampling method, using that tool I cannot find any Christian groups of note denouncing them as heretics. The closest I can find to that is a rival militia leader saying that the Hutaree are neither Christian nor a militia. Given that they are undeniably a militia, that makes his comments rather suspect.
Christendom does represent a particular set of communities with certain shared societal norms and conceptions of the good. But that goes along with the label, and no one of note is seeking to remove that militia from the broader concept of a Christian community.
I’m unconvinced that such an approach is useful. In the case of odd-balls that may be at the interface between different genres, I think it is better to define them one way and proceed from there. If the dubbed genre ends up being a poor match, the process of treating it as such will ferret that out. The subject can then be re-dubbed and re-tested. On the other hand, if the dubbing works, you’ve got yourself a nice useful system. So, even if you guess wrong the process will correct itself until you finally hit upon an answer that very nearly resembles the correct one. On the other hand, embracing the sometimes indeterminate nature of things as an insurmountable barrier prevents any progress from occurring what-so-ever.
But I don’t think that militia even occupies a grey area.
well i conducted my own distinctly non-rigorous sample and asked an episcopalian preist and her husband (who also graduated from seminary) whether they would consider the Hutari Christian - and their answer, for what it’s worth to the discussion, was a resounding no. Technically perhaps, in the sense that they had been baptized or whathaveyou, but not Christian in any relevant theological sense
well, i think the Pope has a lot on his plate at the moment, but perhaps he’ll get around to it eventually, perhaps not - the fact remains these guys stretched most reasonable definitions of Christian behavior to the breaking point, if not beyond, insofar as i know anything about how Christians are supposed to behave anyway
they were just some dumb people with guns who started a club, calling them a specifically Christian militia seems a bit overdone, from what i understand of their ideology and motives.
no - they were undoubtedly a militia, i have no argument otherwise - and you are right that it is often more useful simply to define and proceed - but you have to be careful how you define certain things - defining this militia as a Christian militia might not be doing proper justice to the term
Al Queda they were not, in any case
Fair rebuttal. But I’d point out that your n of 2 is less powerful than the combined n of Google. Given my love of hierarchy, I’ll even accept your rebuttal and unequivocally say that they were not Anglicans. But given that the category “Christian” is substantially more expansive than the category “Anglican”, I’m not sure that the rebuttal you’ve given disproves my point beyond a very narrow, specific narrative. And aren’t those wont to talk about the nature of narratives also wont to talk about big tents and having an open mind?
What is a reasonable definition of Christian behavior? This is important. For present-day Protestants in America, it means little beyond saying “I love Jesus” in public. What is a reasonable standard of Christian behavior?
Dumb people, that is a matter of perspective. Club, most certainly. Christian? I still haven’t seen why not. Not Anglican, sure. Not Christian?
Well, that is a matter of success and media attention more than actual substance, wouldn’t you say? Why oughtn’t I define that militia as “Christian” unless I wanted to avoid offending Christians? That is an important reason, don’t get me wrong. But it has more to do with self-censorship than it does to the publicly perceived truth.
I work on the commercial boundary of research and technology, and it’s a constant struggle two ways - industry wants the quick return, academia wants the underlying theory. Or alternatively, academia seems to think that money just appears from nowhere, industry want to find ways to support the research. 
Personally I think there’s a great value in research that is not directly applicable to technology - Boolean mathematics is a good example, but there are many thousands more. It’s just a hard job to sell that to accountants who have books to balance.
Xunzian, I think there’s an important dimension to this that you’re neglecting. People who take Christ’s teachings seriously are not only anti-violence, they are probably also against judging other people (“let him who is without sin cast the first stone”), which is of course a recipe for a silent majority. Whether this is the case and this silent majority exists or not, I can’t say. Even then, is the content of religious teachings really subject to majority rule? I think there is something somewhat more “objective” to it than that. I don’t know.
Are Christians anti-violence? Such a view would render most “Christians” both contemporary and historical non-Christian. That seems a rather silly way to define the term, don’t you think?
You’re probably, definitely, more knowledgeable about the issue than me then, i only sometimes have to work with people who work on that boundary. My view is just that of the taxpayer, and i had - still have to some extent - doubts about all the taxmoney being spend on what i sometimes suspect are partly prestigeprojects. Belgium is a small country, with few big technological companies, so if open research has long term benifits for technology, it’s probably being validated in companies abroad. Great for the progress of humankind, but a bad deal for the Belgian taxpayer 
.
Ha, indeed! However, the main thrust of my example was simply to reinforce the point that there are actually Christians out there (probably representative of a larger pool) who would declare the Hutari to not be Christian, so the “community of relevance” and “community art large” which you referred to earlier is probably pretty mixed as to whether or not these guys were/are in fact Christian. That they self-identified as such there is no question - but i could self-identify as a Christian right now, that wouldn’t make me one - there’s simply more to it than that, as you yourself have pointed out.
i agree it’s important but i think one could make a legitimate theological argument that the deliberate slaughter of innocent people at a funeral as the Hutari planned is unChristian behavior - murder is not generally something Christians are permitted to engage in - it’s a mortal sin, after all.
what makes you say perspective? apparently these guys actually believed their actions would touch off a nationwide uprising - that’s just dumb.
again, not Christian in that their motives completely belie many commonly accepted theological / ideological conceptions of what it means to be a Christian - flipping it around, i still haven’t seen how they can be considered Christian in anything but name
No, i think Al Queda are far more religiously driven than these guys are - but you’re right, it’s mostly a matter of not offending Christians - again however, the fact that such Christians might be offended in the first place indicates that the community of relevance is not unianimous on the question of whether or not these dudes are Christian in the first place - which brings me back to my original question: How far does the community of relevance extend? Does it include Anglicans? Devout Catholics? seems to me there are many Christians who might take offense at the notion that these guys are of the same religious stripe (granted, i don’t have any Google results to back it up, but from my experience of the Christian public i think it’s a safe assumption, don’t you?)
All that said, though - i think i would really need to understand more about what these guys thought, you might be right that they deserve the label - i just don’t know enough about them yet.
Sorry to butt into your discussion, but i agree. I recently read the antichrist, and aside from his maybe overly negative valuation of christianity and Jesus, i remember being very impressed with Nietzsche’s description of them, as description.
According to Nietzsche the doctrine of Jezus christ (not necessarily the christianity of the church that has grown out of it) is a psychological state, a certain state of mind. And ‘objective’ in the sense that is not something exclusive to Jezus Christ, or “created” by him, but something that tends to return time and again in certain people over the ages.
Perhaps it is. Yet Christ clearly taught non-violence as an ideal, if we are to believe the Bible. I don’t think the fact that all people are more or less violent makes them by definition non-Christian.
Nietzsche’s insights are usually interesting. I like this one.
I agree, self-identification matters very little. But I’m still not sure that the communities of relevance/at large don’t think of these people as Christian. I mean, they started out as a freakin’ prayer circle and expanded from there. At the core of their organization, they remained a prayer circle. An obviously insane one, but a prayer circle.
Murder is a mortal sin, but killing during a conflict is acceptable. Since they view themselves as in a war with the Antichrist, killing is permissible under a variety of justifications, like Just War Theory. And I’m pretty sure that waging war against the Antichrist counts as a “Just War” from a Christian perspective.
I dunno. To me, “dumb” means an inability to really think about things. I don’t think they didn’t think about their actions, I think they thought way too much about them. I’d call them “insane”. But the basic sentiment remains the same between those two statements.
Fighting the Antichrist is unchristian? I’d say that such behavior is very Christian! They may have misidentified the Antichrist but that doesn’t mean that their motives were unchristian.
Perhaps it is just a matter of the Christians you know and the image that sampling has created in your mind. In my experience, most Christians would recognize the militia as Christian and feel a deep sense of shame/embarrassment at their behavior. Their sentiment would be, “That isn’t how Christians are supposed to behave” not “Those people were not Christians”. It is a fine line but in creating groups I think it is an important one. I think it would be very easy to argue that they are bad Christians. That they are not Christians take a little more.
Anon,
I think it depends on the part of the Bible you look at. In Revelations, for example. Lots of good vs. evil conflict stuff in there.
True, though the book of Revelations is so radically different in tone and content than the rest of the New Testament that it demands to be read in a different light. There are no straightforward moral commands that I know of in Revelations, while Jesus was recorded as making explicit statements regarding proper outlook and behavior.
To change the subject slightly, and bring it back to my original thoughts and questions… I believe that beliefs matter - that what and how we believe what we do has an empirical effect on the world. I think it’s nonsense to believe otherwise. Yet I also think that the connection between belief as cause and some empirical effect can’t be empirically demonstrated, given the murky nature of belief. In other words, what is the relationship between Christian beliefs and a plot to kill law enforcement officers? How do we identify what the belief in this case actually is? Does it make sense to talk about what belief a person “actually holds”? Or is the proof purely in the pudding? I personally think belief plays a causal role empirically speaking, but I don’t think belief can be identified or demonstrated empirically. This may be problematic, but it doesn’t make sense to me to suggest that belief and action are utterly inseparable. These questions are interesting to me, and I wonder what others’ thoughts are on the matter. These are questions for anyone of course, not just for Xunzian.
I wonder if Jesus said the following, in order to be accepted by his peers:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
Is this an example of deception? Because he clearly spoke as if his teachings superceded the Old Testament teachings:
“You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I tell you, do not resist an evil person.”
I don’t think so. I think he truly believed that he was fulfilling the law of the prophets. In doing so he had to abolish what the jewish priests had made of these laws, which was in his mind something entirely different.
In Nietzsche’s rendering - again - Jezus was some kind anti-establishment anarchist who took Judaism even up (or down depending on how you look at it) a notch, taking equality and acceptance to the extreme. The judaic inspired culture of the time still had social structure and hierarchy.
That was the essense of Jezus true evangelical teaching, according to Nietzsche at least, the abolisement of difference. And ironicly his words were later coöpted by the christian church to form yet another hierarchical power structure that had very little to to with Jezus word.
One useful way to look at beliefs is i think, not necessarily looking at the content of specific beliefs, but looking for the level of abstraction, strenght of conviction and the origin of beliefs, physical world or feelings.
Wide abstract idea’s, strong convictions and beliefs based on feeling, will go togheter a lot of the time. These people can do some crazy stuff. A discriminating mind, who tests his idea’s and is willing to change his beliefs… not so much.