Which is better…?

That depends on what you mean by ‘better’.

Better for your own life? Better for others? Better for community/society? Better to honour Christ and/or God? Better for your chances of salvation?

I think there are many people who believe in a god but reject Christianity. There are probably a few who believe in the God but reject Christianity.

But I think I can see what you’re getting at. Or I could be totally wrong.

As difficult as it may be in practice, I think that it would be ‘better’ to attempt to follow Christianity yet not believe in God. This option is largely positive and pro-active. Others would benefit from this approach, through your Christ-like love and care for them.
But is it even possible to make a serious attempt at following Christ while not believing in God?

Does the ‘not believing’ you refer to equate with ‘rejecting’?

For one who at first does not believe in God but attempts to follow Christ, I imagine the chances would be fairly high that eventually he would come to believe in God, if he did not out-right reject God.

To believe in God but reject Christ would not necessarily result in the positive, pro-active life of the person above, so I’d say that this is not better.

Although, I can’t help thinking that either approaches could not be conducted without an air of legalism.

Sorry, I just wrote stuff down as I thought of it.

Well since it’s impossible to follow Christianity without believing in God, I guess the first is better. It must be better if it’s the only one option that actually exists, because a non-reality is clearly worse than a reality (thus goes the ontological answer to your question

Another way to argue it would be to say that at least the first person is being honest in their rejection of Christ. The second is just pretending.

Since it’s impossible to follow Christianity without following Christianity, I think Dan has the right idea. But I define Christianity as ‘living in the imitation of Christ’ rather than ‘assenting to a (variously defined) set of theological conclusions’. Certainly, I have a set of theological conclusions I’ve kind of settled on, but it’s not my beliefs that can change the world - it’s my actions.

For myself, I think I might lean more towards non-Christian theism out of the two - I guess because I tend to be an idealist. I’m not a thoroughly convinced theist either, but in figuring out a worldview to live by, I’d rather go for the most simple and most abstract, and then figure out how to apply it for myself. Theism kind of allows this by (arguably) getting the huge questions of ’should I be moral in the first place?’ and ‘does what I do have any significance whatsoever?’ out of the way, and then I can get on with doing the best I can.

The trouble with atheistic Christianity, for me, is that without the God element, it seems like the commitment to Christ becomes a little arbitrary. If someone then asked me, “Yes but why Jesus, rather than Gandhi or Socrates or Thoreau? Or, for that matter, why anybody? Why not just common sense?” - I’m not sure how I’d answer. I’ve just come to find creeds distasteful. Following any one person’s teachings starts to feel dangerous. Even though Jesus’ teachings *do* seem incredibly onto it, and also just about as pared-back-to-elementals as you can get, I still worry about getting into a situation where my commitment to someone else’s ‘rightness’ gets in the way of me using my own judgement. Which sounds a bit arrogant - thinking I know better than Jesus - but I kind of don’t know what else to do. Maybe it’s that I want to own my decisions, not fall back on anyone else’s. (Though I suppose it could be argued that all of that is part of what Jesus was advocating… but it’s the principle of the thing…)

Anyhow, both positions sound very appealing, and anyone holding either one would probably be someone I’d enjoy talking to

Heh, in a sense I started out as #2 (not believing in God, but attempting to follow Christianity) and ended up as #1 (believing in God but rejecting Christianity) - but only if you use very narrow definitions of the two. By that I mean ‘God’ = the Christian understanding of God rather than a foggy awareness of some kind of spiritual realm that probably contains a god of some description; and ‘Christianity’ = the very narrow interpretation of what it means to be a ‘real’ Christian that I initially found in the Western evangelical church (with good helpings of fundamentalism, legalism and pentecostalism!).

So really it all comes down to definitions and the individual.

By ‘not believing in God, but attempting to follow Christianity’ do we mean western evangelical christianity, traditional Roman Catholic christianity, eastern orthodox or emergent christianity? Do we mean someone trying to follow the example of Jesus in love, sacrifice and social action, or a legalistic person trying to follow traditional Christian moral rules and values? Does ‘not believing in God’ mean not believing in the Christian God that includes the person of Jesus in the trinity, complete atheism, or somewhere in between? We could be looking at someone that doesn’t follow traditional Christian theology relating to God, but still believes in a god and lives out their ‘Christianity’ in a way very similar to other Christians.

So it all gets very messy and academic and there are so many different possible answers depending on the specific individual that I am being very postmodern and refusing to give a straight answer

In summary: I believe that the main thing that divides people into ‘categories’ is their basic take on life/religion (fundamentalist, liberal, social justice, moralistic, chilled out, ambivalent, fanatical, wise, loving, selfish, searching…) rather than the particular religion/label they adhere to (Christian, muslim, atheist, agnostic, Marxist, environmentalist…). Some beliefs and interactions with God/the world are positive, others are damaging.

I may not be making sense to anyone but myself, so I’ll shut up now. I kinda just wrote this off the top of my head. Sorry

Okay, I kind of assumed Nato’s question defined ‘believing in God’ in terms of having some kind of Christian beliefs, and ‘Christianity’ in terms of living the kind of lifestyle Jesus and the NT writers taught about (which I think can be followed without reference to Christian theology) - but maybe my interpretation of those terms was non-standard.