Sure sure. But then again love God and love your neighbor and the Golden Rule are pretty vague.
"Vague"? Is "pervasive" the word you meant to reach for?
Attempting to keep true to those which are spelled out in neon as the most important bits occasionally garners accusations of "casual" from people who want to trot out other random parts.
Yep. Too bad there isn't total agreement on which bits are in neon, what color the neon is, and just how brightly it shines relative to all the other signs.
And lets not even get started on fundamentalists: "These are the bits I was told are neon. End of discussion."
Not everyone is American, so you will need to explain that one, what you said in the brackets.
In short, and all IIRC: Someone in Alabama studying law pointed out that a progressive tax policy is "WJWD". ("Pointed out" here being wrote a paper, or gave a speech or something like that.) It caused some short-term consternation among Republicans - it persuaded the Governor - until, so far as I can tell, the whole thing disappeared down the memory hole.
So if someone says they are a Christian and goes against the teachings of Christ, then they aren't following Christ and thus they shouldn't call themselves Christian. It is a betrayal of the term.
The phrase "Let him cast a stone at her." comes to mind.
There's significant variation in what people consider the necessary-and-sufficient "bits" of the teaching to follow and how consistently they follow them (the neon) and (back to my metaphor now) the four vegetables.
Where (of course "IMO") many deeply religious people fail to be humble - let alone reasonable - is the degree of certainty they assign to the idea that their personal beliefs are the true faith. There's nothing wrong with having deep religious beliefs. There's nothing wrong with thinking they're completely and utterly true. Problems come in, however, when people forget that they might be wrong, and no one outside their sect has any reason to treat their position as privileged.
Probably not completely... but once you start flinging around absolute statements, or legislating, even small mis-steps can be very problematical.
As a general comment: IMO many people put way too much emphasis on professing to follow the proper teachings vs. actually doing so: If you go to the right place of worship every proper day of the week you're given a *heck* of a lot of leeway in what you do the rest of the week.
