@MeanMrMustard and @joeyjojo: I personally don’t care what YOU believe, I’m merely talking about the definition of “Christian”. As I said, there are other faiths, it’s like the definition of master electrician, just because I know how to fix my electric doesn’t make me a (licensed) electrician, you can’t say a master electrician is anyone who believes himself to be an electrician, there is in most jurisdiction a legal definition of master, you can’t call yourself an electrician unless you qualify by some third parties’ definitions. There are other things, almost everything in this world, you can tell people you are a girl when you are in fact a man, you can’t change the definitions of man and woman however.
Historically speaking, Christians are by definition those who believe in the deity of Christ. As you know from other posts, I have my own critical view of faith and Christianity, that doesn’t take away the fact that the core tenets of Christians and Jews and Muslims are not interchangeable, just like the definition of man and woman is not interchangeable.
That being said, MeanMrMustard, you said if you believe in your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, yes, you are a Christian for the original meanings of the title Lord in the Bible, the divine title Adonai or kurios, which is used whenever the OT refers to God or the NT refers to Jesus. Adonai meaning being “Lord of lords” aka God. Now, you can try to argue against that Adonai does refer to God, rejecting all of Jewish and Christian and Muslim traditions (at least when it comes to the Old Testament), and start a religion around it, but outside of your small group, you will find it hard to convince others that your beliefs are ‘just like them’, just like it is hard to get a doctor to treat you as girl when you are in fact a man.
Now don’t confuse this with the facts of trinitarianism, which is not provable, you’d have to have scientific proof for God etc etc, but that is a different conversation. Likewise the influence of other religions on both Judaism and Christianity is a fact, I believe all faiths are a distillation of natural rules and ideas and stories of what came before, therefore rejecting that JWs and Mormons do is dangerous because it ignores the reasons for the establishment of that belief. Just like accepting a man can be a woman is destabilizing to society (man in women’s sports, man in women’s bathrooms etc), there is a deeper core truth to the trinity that you can’t just reject from modern society without removing the underpinnings of the renaissance and by that modern science etc. which is why it was independently discovered in many religions as others here point out, it is a pattern that keeps appearing in India, in China, in Africa, which means there is a core there that we in Christianity express as “father-figure” (tradition, wisdom, stable future and past), a “son-figure” (youthful progression, something that conquers death, compassionate, caretaker) and then a “spirit-figure” (the inside voice, truth, music, water, desire) and then humans/faith is all of this in one, and they have to be in balance or together or whatever you want to call it, but they can’t be separated from each other else you lose your humanity, tradition without progress is bad, you become stuck, youthful vigor without checks and balances, just look at people between 18-25 and what they believe, vote and fight for and then if you just had the spirit, only the transcendent, only pursuit of pleasure and desires, you basically become an empty vessel, a hedonist, like many philosophers in the 18th and 19th century.
