> > This opens an interesting question: may anyone be a Christian without even realizing it?

> I'm inclined to think so. [...] As a young adult he found a King James Bible, read it, and began to live by it.

My reply is the following excerpt from a column I wrote, when I was 24, for a politically left-oriented local magazine, as a follow up to a "who's good-who's bad" kind of article.

" [...] From a non-Christian point of view, Christianity may seem a bunch of people that preach a set of strict rules about our behaviour in both social and private life. Moreover, the Church seems to have some kind of control of our lives and seems to have the power to decide by itself what is good or bad, so limiting our freedom to express ourselves whenever our pursuit for happiness (or simply our personal opinion about 'good' or 'bad') conflicts with its one. So, at first glance, Christianity seems bad to the non-Christian because it's limiting (or, at any rate, that's what the non-religious feels about any religion). [...]

Feeling the Church, or Christianity, as entities devoted to "train" Christian people like an Army may train its soldiers, is in some way an historical/phylosophical alteration of the truth. Wether or not we perceive from history (up to XIXth century and Pope Pio IX) that the Roman Catholic Church has been more a political power than a spiritual one, it's easy to understand that Christianity is made of people that live their lives following a set of rules not because they fear a punishment but because they have found the way to pursue their happiness. [...]

Sometimes, we meet people that live their lives, both publicly and privately, in a way that may seem Christian, except that they don't pray, don't read the Bible, don't go to a church; they don't do the most important things a Christian is supposed to do from a common-sense (or stereotypical?) point of view. Maybe they ignore all about Christianity, maybe they act so because of a political or phylosophical point of view. They, however, follow a strict set of rules and behave in a way that seems a pursuit for happiness: not *their own* happiness, but *everyone* happiness. They look for a better world; they ask questions about themselves and the meaning of life; they are, in some way or another, listening to their inner voice. [...]

The question is still unanswered: are they Christian or not?

I think that everybody should let that question unanswered (it's not up to us to give an answer about people that may not agree with our opinion) and should try to understand the worthy lesson they're teaching us."

AP-