Definition of Christian

[Chuck Naill]

Chuck, Jesus never said to mortify the flesh, did he?

Matthew 5:30, "And if your right hand is causing you to sin, cut it off and throw it away..." However, a person apprenticed to Jesus will experience a Holy Spirt led spiritual formation whereby the body, the hands, the eyes, and feet, and mind are able to come into cooperation with the person's soul/spirit to live the Kingdom Life. Jesus was, more concerned about what's going on inside. As Paul said, if I give my body to be burned and have not love, I gain nothing.

When Paul says to mortify the flesh, he is not meaning to perform self-mutilation or abuse. He means to take away its power over doing what the person's spirit does not desire to do. A person in the Kingdom will normally and simply not want to abuse his neighbors or sleep with his friend's wife. Since this will not happen overnight practicing solitude, silence, fasting, serving, loving, giving, etc are practiced. By taking away the body's ability to have its way, it comes to be mortified.

I honestly doubt anyone here really wants to abuse others. We desire to love each other, but our differences cause us to lash out in anger. What power would we need that would allow us to respond without retaliation? A famous surgeon once said he practiced doing heart transplants on animals so he could come to repeat the process the same way every time. A dancer practices in order to perform the dance the same way every day. This is the concept behind mortification of the flesh. For the apprentice of Jesus, they, through practice, come to not be bothered if they are cut off in traffic, lash out in anger, abuse others, buy a gun and kill 20 people, drive drunk, or tell lies. Again, this takes time. It takes being alone and listening to the Spirit rather than the radio or the New York Times. This is the only way to enjoy the transformed mind that Paul speaks about in his letter to the Roman believers.

And, while all of this is for anyone, the audience were those who were seeking the Kingdom of God and his type of righteousness. What I would suggest to anyone, even the atheist or agnostic, is to find a place of solitude and be silent. This had nothing to do with what's been invented and called Christianity. It is not anti-intellectual, but rather both a psychological and philosophical pursuit to find the best life possible. These curious seekers could say, if you are there, show me. Show me what's real, what's true, and how do I participate in what you are doing. How do I get into the Kingdom of God. How do I love others as I love myself. How can I overcome my tendencies that I hate.

[TSherbs]

Chuck, Jesus never said to mortify the flesh, did he?

Matthew 5:30, "And if your right hand is causing you to sin, cut it off and throw it away..."

That's right, I forgot about the Beatitudes. This is the entire passage on dismemberment/mortification:

27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; 28 but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell.

There are parts of the Beatitudes that I like (although I do not believe that Jesus actually said all this--it is a more likely a rough collection of things that people thought he may have said over various times and places). But this part about mortification always struck me as neurotically violent and suggestive that the body is corrupt, and although not listed, certainly the genitals would also fall under this chastisement and potential for mutilation, eg the African practice of female circumcision (cliteridectomy) to remove the pleasure of sex. Humans and their capacity to mutilate or harm (or self-harm) for "control" over our desires for religious (or other) reasons is frightful.

The Buddha did this kind of self-denial thing (asceticism) also, for seven years, but then learned that this was not the way to enlightenment, and his first dharma talk (so to speak) was to some of his former fellow ascetics to help them see the true path to enlightenment along the Middle Way.

[Chuck Naill]

Chuck, Jesus never said to mortify the flesh, did he?

Matthew 5:30, "And if your right hand is causing you to sin, cut it off and throw it away..."

That's right, I forgot about the Beatitudes. This is the entire passage on dismemberment/mortification:

27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; 28 but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell.

There are parts of the Beatitudes that I like (although I do not believe that Jesus actually said all this--it is a more likely a rough collection of things that people thought he may have said over various times and places). But this part about mortification always struck me as neurotically violent and suggestive that the body is corrupt, and although not listed, certainly the genitals would also fall under this chastisement and potential for mutilation, eg the African practice of female circumcision (cliteridectomy) to remove the pleasure of sex. Humans and their capacity to mutilate or harm (or self-harm) for "control" over our desires for religious (or other) reasons is frightful.

The Buddha did this kind of self-denial thing (asceticism) also, for seven years, but then learned that this was not the way to enlightenment, and his first dharma talk (so to speak) was to some of his former fellow ascetics to help them see the true path to enlightenment along the Middle Way.

Askēsis is the Greek word for translated into English as asceticism. The Greek term simply means to exercise, practice, or train. It is something we do everyday for things we are interested in learning to do or learn about. It is not a practice of harming the body, although some have been mistaught to take that way.

For me, the true intent of Jesus in the Beatitudes was that even if you are poor in spirit, you are not disqualified in getting in on what God is doing. What possible value would be trying to be poor in spirit produce? The reason I interpret the passages this way is because the audience that Jesus was addressing were the nobodies. The last thing they needed were more rules. They were already beaten down by their religion for not measuring up. He changed things up in saying man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man. Over time we come to see the laws, just those 10, as from a benevolent God. When we discipline our children, it stems from our deep love for their wellbeing. God is no different. Jesus said it isn't enough not to sleep with your friend's wife. It is more important to not want to, which requires discipline and getting the heck out of Dodge. In other words, if you cannot control yourself, move out of town. Remove yourself from the things for which you are tempted. Again, mortification of the flesh, or not giving into what the flesh wants is more important that cutting something off. One can continue to be a liar with their tongue cut out. I can still be a rapist or abuser of females with my penis severed. It is not what goes in that defiles, but what comes out.

Since he was accused of being a glutton and a friend of sinners, he had a lifestyle that contrasted significantly from the religious leaders. Jesus said he didn't want his apprentices out of the world. There is a difference in being in the world and of the world.

Paul, writing to his young assistant Timothy offer this understanding, "for bodily training is just slightly beneficial, but godliness is beneficial for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come." I translate godliness as Godforwardness, or being in on what God is doing. This requires trust that not going after someone's jugular in anger is best and will produce a better life.

[TSherbs]

Although I take most of the gospels as fiction, I acknowledge some wisdom in it in places.
I was curious about Jesus, but since I see no divinity in him, he has no more authority to me than the next man or woman. Paul, to me, was an extremist, neurotic zealot. I see very little wisdom in the writings attributed to him. Even Jesus, when he uses references to self mutilation (if he ever actually said such a thing), has moved into the rhetoric of extremism. I once was moved by such fanaticism of spirit (as a young man, 20). I no longer am.

[Chuck Naill]

Would you be able explain why you have the stated opinion about Paul?

[Chuck Naill]

The poet Willard Stafford was asked when he decided to become a poet. His response was that everyone starts out as one, but some stay with it. When I hear someone say they used to believe in God, but later decided they did, or no longer could bring themselves to believe, I am always curious as to what happened. Why didn't they stay with it?

Some say it is because of the suffering in the world. I read or hear this more frequently than any other reason. Some will point to others for whom they do not want to be related. However, there is also a belief that replaces the former belief. This belief is not any less faith than the former. If I said, I don't believe Jesus said what is attributed to him, it is not as if Bart Erhman has proven he didn't.

Now, this is not a reason to believe he did or didn't. As the old folks used to say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The message that Jesus said was for his follower to change the way they lived and think because the economy of the Kingdom of God was as close as their fingertips. For this to be true, experiential knowledge would of course need to follow. Until someone has taken a bite of the pudding, they, at that point, have no proof to offer.

I know some think I am preaching, but that has never been my intent. Does it matter what you think, of course, but it isn't the goal, no was it the goal of Paul or Peter. The goal is the Kingdom of God. where God reigns and gets his way in us as it already is in the heavens. If anyone would actually consider how the world would look if we treated others as we want them to treat us, plus having the power to pull it off, I think it would give them a reason to reconsider.

The real issue is, we do not want to treat others that way. We want to hate them and get revenge. The problem is living this way takes a terrible toll.

[Chip]

Do you mean William Stafford?

I knew him and went on a couple reading tours with him and his son, Kim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stafford_(poet)

[Chuck Naill]

Sorry, thanks for noticing my misspelling of his name.

I’m glad you are familiar. I found what I quoted to be of significance.

[Chip]

He was brought up in a conservative religious sect, the Brethren, who teach pacifism. Bill registered as a conscientious objector during WWII and did alternative service in forestry camps and hospitals. He was almost fifty when he published his first major book of poems, Traveling Through the Dark, which won the National Book Award. Here's the title poem:

Traveling through the Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.


As we drove through southern Utah, I showed him the rock formations and geological layers and petroglyphs and all. He was sort of imterested, but kept his thoughts to himself. My favorite memory is sharing the back seat of the van while he read from a compact edition of Nietzsche, chuckling every now and then.

[Chuck Naill]

Eugene Peterson's book, Run with the Horses contains the quoted passage I used above.

Peterson has performed an extensive study on the life of the Hebrew prophet, Jeremiah and quotes this passage during the reign of Josiah after the 50 year reign of his evil grandfather and father.

“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
I appointed watchmen over you and said,
‘Listen to the sound of the trumpet!’
But you said, ‘We will not listen.’

There is a way to have rest for your souls and yet people say no. They make fun of God and make fun of his wisdom. So, while I can be accused of preaching, some might say, I don't want rest for my soul. I will not listen. I had a bad experience, they might say. I was hurt another might say. It's all ridiculous and superstition, yet they will never take the time to find out if it's experientially true.

I am learning that the Jewish Temple has prostitutes inside the building along with magicians. The debauchery spilled out into the neighborhoods. Murder and abusing the neighbors was the norm. Josiah was read the Deuteronomy scroll about these ancient paths. Since his grandfather and father were evil, he had nothing from which to draw. So, he was read the scroll. His reforms got rid of the sexual worship and magic.

Since sexuality seems to dominate our present society and many excuse the excesses as freedom, does anyone ask or question if from these practices the people who participate are better off. Are they finding rest for their souls?

[Chip]

How does this mortification of the flesh fit into your definition of christian?

He Told Followers to Starve to Meet Jesus. Why Did So Many Do It?

Hundreds were drawn to a remote wilderness in southeastern Kenya by the End Times preaching of pastor Paul Mackenzie. Relatives and ex-members tried to intervene, but some did not want to be rescued.



After bodies were exhumed, holes were left in the ground at a mass gravesite in the Shakahola Forest in Kenya.Credit...Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Andrew Higgins
May 14, 2023

Delirious from hunger, a believer who had brought his family to live with a Christian doomsday cult in a remote wilderness in southeastern Kenya sent a distraught text to his younger sister last week. While he begged for her help to escape, he was still in the grip of the preacher who had lured him there, promising salvation through death by starvation.

“Answer me quickly, because I don’t have much time. Sister, End Times is here and people are being crucified,” Solomon Muendo, a former street hawker, told his sister. “Repent so that you’re not left behind, Amen.”

Mr. Muendo, 35, has been living in the Shakahola Forest since 2021, when, like hundreds of other believers, he abandoned his home and moved there with his wife and two young children. They were following the call of Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, a former taxi driver turned televangelist who, declaring that the world was about to end, marketed Shakahola to his followers as an evangelical Christian sanctuary from the fast-approaching apocalypse.

Instead of a haven, however, the 800-acre property, a sun-scorched wasteland of scrub and spindly trees, is now a gruesome crime scene, scattered with the shallow graves of believers who starved themselves to death — or, as Mr. Mackenzie would have it, crucified themselves so that they could meet Jesus.

As of this past week, 179 bodies have been exhumed and moved to a hospital mortuary in the coastal town of Malindi, around 100 miles east of Shakahola, for identification and autopsy. The government’s chief pathologists reported last week that while starvation caused many deaths, some of the bodies showed signs of death by asphyxiation, strangulation or bludgeoning. Some had had organs removed, a police affidavit said.

Hundreds more people are still missing, perhaps buried in undiscovered graves. Others are wandering the property without food like Mr. Muendo — whose wife and children are missing, his sister said. The horrific scale of what the Kenyan news media called the “Shakahola Massacre” has left the government struggling to explain how, in a country that counts itself among Africa’s most modern and stable nations, law enforcement had for so long missed the macabre goings-on in an expanse of land located between two popular tourist destinations, Tsavo National Park and the Indian Ocean coast.

That so many people disregarded the most basic human instinct to survive and chose instead to die through fasting has raised sensitive questions about the limits of religious freedom, a right that is enshrined in the Kenyan Constitution.

Evangelical Christianity — and freelance preachers — have surged in popularity across Africa, part of a religious boom on the continent that stands in stark contrast to the rapid secularization of former colonial powers like Britain, which governed Kenya until 1963. About half of Kenyans are evangelicals, a far higher proportion than in the United States. Unlike Roman Catholic or Anglican churches, which are governed by hierarchies and rules, many evangelical churches are run by independent preachers who have no oversight.

Kenya’s president, William Ruto — a fervent believer whose wife is an evangelical preacher — has been wary of imposing restrictions on religious activities, though last week he asked a group of church leaders and legal experts to propose ways to regulate Kenya’s chaotic faith sector.

For Victor Kaudo, a rights activist in Malindi who visited Shakahola in March, the freedom granted preachers like Mr. Mackenzie has gone too far. Tipped off by defectors from the cult, Mr. Kaudo found emaciated believers who, though in the throes of death, cursed him as “an enemy of Jesus” when he tried to help. A starving woman, her head shaved on orders from the cult leadership, flailed angrily on the ground as Mr. Kaudo approached offering sustenance, a video he recorded showed.

“I wanted these starving people to survive, but they wanted to die and meet Jesus,” Mr. Kaudo recalled. “What do we do? Does freedom of worship supersede the right to life?”

Mr. Mackenzie has told investigators that he never ordered his followers not to eat and merely preached about the End Times agonies prophesied in the Book of Revelation, the final chapter of the New Testament. He was arrested in April, set free and then quickly rearrested. He is under investigation over accusations of murder, terrorism and other crimes. His lawyer declined to comment.

Appearing briefly before a court in Mombasa this month, Mr. Mackenzie, 50, wearing a pink jacket, cut a jaunty figure as he waved imperiously from inside a metal cage to get the magistrate’s attention. The magistrate ignored him and extended his detention.

Mr. Mackenzie’s journey from destitute taxi driver to cult leader with his own television channel began in 2002 in a stone courtyard opposite a Catholic primary school in Malindi. The property belonged to Ruth Kahindi, who had met Mr. Mackenzie at a nearby Baptist church and invited him to preach at her home. Together they formed their own church, Good News International, using Ms. Kahindi’s home as its base.

“It was a normal church at the beginning,” recalled Ms. Kahindi’s daughter Naomi, who remembers Mr. Mackenzie as a powerful speaker who initially stuck to the standard evangelical message of salvation through faith in Christ alone and the Bible as the ultimate spiritual authority. After years of close partnership, Ms. Kahindi split with Mr. Mackenzie around 2008, the daughter said, after he became increasingly apocalyptic in his preaching.

There were also quarrels over cash, Ms. Kahindi’s daughter said, adding that Mr. Mackenzie was suspected of pocketing tithes. In response, the daughter said, “he started accusing my mother of witchcraft.”

Mr. Mackenzie stunned his followers in 2019 by announcing that he was closing the church, selling its property and retreating to the Shakahola Forest. Barred from using Ms Kahindi’s home for preaching, Mr. Mackenzie, no longer a pauper, built himself a big concrete prayer hall on a plot of land he had purchased in Furunzi on the outskirts of Malindi and declared this the new home of Good News International Church. Word spread of his warnings of the coming Battle of Armageddon.

Though bitterly estranged from Ms. Kahindi, he took with him one of her daughters, Mary, who had married one of Mr. Mackenzie’s most fervent followers, Smart Mwakalama, a former hotel cleaner. Mr. Mwakalama is now also under arrest. His wife, Mary, and their six children have all vanished and are feared to be among the dead buried in Shakahola.

Mr. Mackenzie, said Mary’s sister Naomi, “is a demon” who has “ruined too many lives.”

Among those caught in the ruins is Priscilla Riziki, an impoverished villager who introduced her oldest daughter, Lorine, to Mr. Mackenzie’s preaching a decade ago. Wracked by guilt and grief, she visits the Malindi morgue each day to search for her daughter and three grandchildren, all of whom moved to Mr. Mackenzie’s retreat in 2021. “My only hope now is to just see my daughter — either dead or alive,” Ms. Riziki said.

A mob of angry residents, some of them disconsolate relatives of missing cult members, ransacked Mr. Mackenzie’s former church, last week, tearing down its pink front gate and smashing the surrounding wall.

“People are very angry and blame Mackenzie, but I blame the government,” Damaris Muteti, a member of a rival evangelical church and itinerant preacher, said, surveying the wreckage. “Mackenzie is a good man, but the Devil used him,” she said. “Something went wrong.”

A peanut seller named Titus Katana, who joined the Good News church in 2015 and rose to become deputy pastor, said he initially had great admiration for Mr. Mackenzie and his preaching. “He changed because of his false prophecies” about the end of the world, Mr. Katana said. “His main interest became making money, not preaching to the world.” By 2017, he recalled, Mr. Mackenzie had started telling worshipers not to see doctors or send their children to school. He set up his own unregistered, fee-paying school at his church. He also claimed divine healing powers, for which he also charged.

“He told me he had received a revelation from God” about education and medicine being sinful, Mr. Katana recalled. “Everything bad started with this.”

Mr. Mackenzie had by this time expanded his reach far beyond the Kenyan coast thanks to his establishment of Times TV, a gospel channel that beamed his increasingly fiery sermons over the internet and across Africa. Among those missing in Shakahola are a Nigerian citizen and a Kenyan flight attendant.

Elizabeth Syombua, the sister of the man now starving in the wilderness, said she and her brother had been entranced by Mr. Mackenzie’s television broadcasts. “You get addicted to what he says,” she said, recalling how she used to rush home from work at a Mombasa sewing factory so that she could join her brother to watch. “He is like an evil spirt with this strange power to lure people into his trap,” she said.

Mr. Mackenzie’s growing popularity, however, also attracted the attention of the authorities. He was arrested in October 2017 on four charges, including radicalization and promoting extremist beliefs, crimes that had previously been leveled mostly at Muslims responsible for a number of terrorist attacks in Kenya. Mr. Mackenzie pleaded not guilty and was acquitted.

He was detained again in 2019, and released on bail. He escalated his confrontation with the government, denouncing its introduction of national identification numbers for citizens as “the mark of the beast” — and yet another sign of approaching apocalypse. Threatened with further prosecution, Mr. Mackenzie stunned his followers in 2019 by announcing that he was closing down the church, selling off its property and retreating to Shakahola Forest. He invited followers to join him and purchase small plots on what he said would be a new Holy Land.

Mr. Katana, his former deputy preacher, said he had bought an acre for 3,000 Kenyan shillings, then worth around $30 — a low price but still a boon for Mr. Mackenzie, who did not legally own the land he was selling. The arrival of the Covid pandemic in Kenya in 2020 increased the appeal of Mr. Mackenzie’s land offer and, for many, vindicated his longstanding message that the world was coming to an end.

Increasingly obsessed with the coming apocalypse, Mr. Mackenzie, according to Mr. Katana, issued “new instructions” in January to the hundreds of people who had moved to Shakahola, which the televangelist divided into districts with biblical names like Jericho and Jerusalem. Mr. Mackenzie, casting himself as a Christ-like figure, lived in a section he called Galilee — after the area of Palestine where Jesus lived most of his life.

The instructions, Mr. Katana said, featured a methodical plan for mass suicide through starvation. The first to perish were to be children, who were “to fast in the sun so they would die faster,” Mr. Katana said, recalling the pastor’s words. In March and April, it would be the turn of women, followed by men.

Titus Katana said he initially had great admiration for Mr. Mackenzie, but “he changed because of his false prophecies.” Mr. Mackenzie, according to Mr. Katana, said that he would stay alive to help lead his followers to “meet Jesus” through starvation but that once this work was done, he, too, would starve himself to death ahead of what he said was the imminent end of the world.

In a video post online in March, Mr. Mackenzie said that he had “heard the voice of Christ telling me that ‘the work I gave you to preach End Time messages for nine years has come to an end.’”

Mr. Katana said he had by this time broken with Mr. Mackenzie and wasn’t in Shakahola when the suicide program started, but heard about it from believers who were. He went to the police to report that “kids are dying” in the forest. “They never took any action until it was too late,” he said.

In April, Mr. Muendo, the former hawker who moved to Shakahola in 2021 with his family, telephoned his sister in Mombasa and told her that “we are starting a fast so that we can go to see Christ in Golgotha,” a reference to the site of Jesus’s crucifixion in the Bible. “I told him: ‘I’m praying for you but we need you, so don’t crucify yourself,’” the sister, Ms. Syombua, said.

Mr. Muendo, according to his sister, asked her to understand that he had no choice but “to go through to the end.” The sister said, “He was happy, because he thought he would be dying soon for Jesus.”

As for Mr. Mackenzie, she added, “he is a murderer.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/w...e=articleShare

[TSherbs]

Wow. There ya go. a la Jim Jones, Heaven's Gate, David Koresh, et al: extreme rhetoric, end times prophecy, narcissistic delusions of divine appointment, gullible followers. And you end up with tragedy, including the death of children.

The contra-positioning of spirit versus the body is one of the neurotic tragedies of religion, especially Christianity and Islam.

[Chuck Naill]

I read the article yesterday. Very sad that so many suffered, but these incidents demonstrate the level of ignorance that exists that would even allow these tragedies to occur. However, this is not a commentary on discipleship with Jesus, but rather discipleship with people and usually men.

I have never heard of "contra-positioning of spirit versus body", but I would appreciate Ted explaining why he thinks Christianity is a neurotic tragedy.

[TSherbs]

There is no such thing as mind-body division, and no such thing as a soul. The western monotheisms get this wrong, and their emphasis on "purity" (in food, thought, and sexual action) bifurcate these "opposites" further, increasing neurotic repression, guilt, punishment and self-harm.

[Chip]

Pneuma is an ancient Greek word for "breath", and in religious usage for "spirit" or "soul". It has specific meanings for medical writers and classical philosophers, particularly in regard to physiology, and is also used in Greek translations of ruach רוח in the Hebrew Bible, and in the Greek New Testament.

That is, breath, the taking in and letting out of the air of this world, is the original meaning of soul, which doesn't exist otherwise.

The Navajo (Diné) employ this idea beautifully in their description of "holy wind" as the source of life and spirit.

[Chuck Naill]

God is spirit. Jesus is God in bodily form. The Holy Spirit, given to disciples to help them in Kingdom life is spirit. Now this is something that a person would either experience or not. It is the power that all the Apostles taught the new disciples. The Jews tried to thwart the Apostles efforts of living by the Spirit and this is the subject of several of Paul's letters such as the one written to the called out ones in Galatia.

Jesus spoke of rest, a easy yoke, freedom, life, peace, and joy. This also is experiential. It is either happening or it isn't. The psalmist wrote, "God, you are my refuge. I trust you and I am safe". People trust or they don't.

That American Christians don't experience these benefits or act appropriately does not invalidate the good news. It just means they invented something else and are now having to live with it.

[TSherbs]

Pneuma is an ancient Greek word for "breath", and in religious usage for "spirit" or "soul". It has specific meanings for medical writers and classical philosophers, particularly in regard to physiology, and is also used in Greek translations of ruach רוח in the Hebrew Bible, and in the Greek New Testament.

That is, breath, the taking in and letting out of the air of this world, is the original meaning of soul, which doesn't exist otherwise.

The Navajo (Diné) employ this idea beautifully in their description of "holy wind" as the source of life and spirit.

very cool

This reminds me of the breathing of life into man's nostrils in Genesis 2, the "inspiring" of life energy. This is from etymonline.com :

SPIRIT

mid-13c., "life, the animating or vital principle in man and animals," from Anglo-French spirit, Old French espirit "spirit, soul" (12c., Modern French esprit) and directly from Latin spiritus "a breathing (of respiration, also of the wind), breath;" also "breath of a god," hence "inspiration; breath of life," hence life itself.

... It is a derivative of spirare "to breathe," and formerly was said to be perhaps from a PIE *(s)peis- "to blow" (source also of Old Church Slavonic pisto "to play on the flute"). But de Vaan says the Latin verb is "Possibly an onomatopoeic formation imitating the sound of breathing. There are no direct cognates." Compare conspire, expire, inspire.

[Chuck Naill]

This past Sunday my grandchild was serving the mothers by holding the door for them before and after the services. When I went to get him to take him home, he said he thought we had forgotten him. He didn't look afraid, but he was. I explained that I would never leave him alone, that I would always be there to protect him and take care of him. What a beautiful reminder of God's love for those who put their lives under his care.
"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”

[TSherbs]

This isn't so much a definition of Christian, but a partial description of the current state of Christianity in America: in decline. My parents were part of the WW2 generation's great boom in church attendance, and both worked in churches (my stepfather, too). That wave is receding:

NPR article on Christian church declining attendance and closings

[Chuck Naill]

Last month I met a couple who said they have attended a Baptist church nearby for decades. Their church has lost it's membership over the years and have allowed a non-denominational gathering to use their building after their services are over. This non-denominational church is growing in size with younger members who have lots of children. I asked them if they would consider becoming a part of this growing group, and they said no. The reason was not doctrine, but the type of music the new church used which includes using drums and guitars.

It is true that these institutional denominations are losing their members or their members are passing with age. What younger generations want is a spiritual/"full gospel" experience within a non segregated setting, and an involvement in the community feeding and clothing as well as adoption and pro-life support. However, it is not that The Message of Jesus is losing interest.