ok so
Try this........If the overwhelming majority of people think 'Bugs Bunny' refers to a cat
, and a tiny minority think it refers to an engaging, carrot-munching cartoon rabbit, the majority is wrong. They can use Bugs Bunny to refer to engaging carrot-munching cartoon rabbits if that works for them; but if they try to insist that their view has any wider validity, they will be, literally, correct. Bugs bunny is a rabbit, not a cat. minority rule? Absolutely. It's how language works.
See how your logic does not work?
That is because you base it on a fallacy!
The fallacy works like this
Premise: Most people believe A
Conclusion: Therefore A must be true
Premise: Most people disagree with B
Conclusion: Therefore B is false
sorry
No apology required, tho' do please try to keep up.
I never said what the majority
believes is necessarily true. That would be absurd. It would, eg, mean that for many hundreds of years the world was flat. What I said was that
what words mean is defined by the ways they are used. By people. People generally. Not a few people, but people at large. That's what enables us, on the whole, to communicate.
So, for hundreds of years, people may have been wrong in their belief that the world was flat, but at least everyone would have known what they
meant by that statement. That the world resembled, say, an ice rink rather than an orange. In the case under discussion, the word 'Christian' means people who, among other things, believe that there is such a thing as god (who, that's to say, would answer the common or garden question: 'Do you believe in God?' with the unambiguous answer: 'Yes'); and that Jesus was qualitatively different from, say, Gandhi: ie, he was not just a splendid fellow and a fine moral teacher, but - in some sense - a divine being. As in 'God the Son'.
And if you don't buy into those specific beliefs, you may be 'christian' - in that your behaviour exemplifies Christian precepts as to how one should conduct oneself - but you cannot be '
a Christian', because a Christian is, among other things, someone who believes that there is a god, and that Jesus is his only begotten son.Whether or not that's true is for theologians and bulletin board pedants to squabble over. Whether it's what the word
means is - at least at this point in time - not really open to debate. Maybe that will change. Maybe in a hundred years' time the man on the Clapham omnibus will be able to say: "Well, he's a Christian but he doesn't believe in God." But right now, that's not the case. The man on the Clapham omnibus would see that as a contradiction in terms. And he'd be right.
My logic's fine, thanks.