Reply #48: There you go again. All musicians must play exactly the same notes in exactly the same arrangement

[patrice]

, preferably on the same instruments, and if they don't, they aren't musicians. That's the same thing as saying "All Christians have to 'accept Jesus' or they aren't Christians."

For some of us, there is no question about whether **I** accept anything or not. Truth IS Truth. Saying I must accept some truth in order for it to be true is like saying I have to accept that the sun rises in order for the sun to rise.

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You are trying to use words as though they are identical with that to which they/words ONLY refer. Words are only squiggles on a page and they are only systematic events in our vocal apparatus; they are not the things/events themselves to which they ONLY refer. "Accepting Jesus" is not identical with, those words are NOT the SAME thing as, Christianity. Those words "Accept Jesus" only REFER to ongoing real world phenomena that ARE Christianity. Just like the word "black" is NOT Blackness, it only refers to something that we have come to label with five letters, b, l, a, c, and k, which form a phoneme that over time has become associated with something out there in the world that we know as blackness. The way you are treating "accept Jesus" is just like saying b - l - a - c - and k ARE the phenomenal quality known as blackness.

Try a little thought experiment: Think of Christianity being completely the same as it is, everything happened and happening, the things people did, just like Christianity did/does, but in a universe without words or language. What would Christianity be without there ever having been any such thing as words and language? What would Christianity be without a, c, c, e, p, t, J, e, s, u, and s?