So who/what am I, anyway?

I am a republican. I am a democrat. Ahh, but those of you who know me best know that I am an undeclared/independent. I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat.

Maybe you didn’t catch on at first to the way I was using the lowercase and uppercase letters. What a fun trick, eh?

And I’m a christian.

Ahhh, but wait. Christ was a living dude. “Christ” is the dude’s last name. You have to use the capital “C” when you refer to a dude using his name.

And what’s the big deal, you might be thinking. Well… while Catholics and Methodists and Lutherans and Mormons and Baptists and Episcopalians and Congregationalists and Presbyterians and… sorry to those of you I’ve left out… while all of these people have been referring to themselves as Christians for years and years, other groups have decided to start their own denominations and instead of using a more official-sounding name just call themselves “Christians”.

What the fuck, people. Don’t you know how much this messes everything up?

There’s only one capital “C”. If you call yourself a Christian and I call myself a Christian, well I sure as hell ain’t your kind of Christian any more than you are anything resembling the kind of Christian I grew up with or that belongs to my particular community. (Just for a little additional background, I grew up as in the Methodist church, but have more recently resided in the Congregational corner of the world.)

So when I see the word “Christian” or when somebody says “I am a Christian”… well how am I supposed to know which kind? Are you a real old-fashioned Christian with a normal capital “C” or are you one of those newfangled Jesus-come-lately kind of Christians that stole that word from the rest of us?

Well I have a suggestion. It involves a few more keystrokes, but the HTML gods (sorry) have given us a solution. When I refer to myself as a Christian I’ll just use the normal capital “C” since I can’t use the lowercase “C” because… you know… dude’s name.

And those of you that don’t have a better name for your denomination can use the big tag. That’s right, the <big> tag. Try it out, it’s fun — <big>C</big>hristian comes out looking like this: Christian.

With the use of this bit of technological wizardry we’ll finally be able to tell the difference between your kind of Christian and my kind of Christian.

Not that I have ever had any trouble telling the difference anyway.