What's in a name?

[Gho the Girl]

Here's a question:

I claim the title of Christian, however Catholics and certain other sects of Christiany would say that I am not because I don't ascribe to the correct theological beliefs and practices.

We've all had the discussion as to why Wicca needs to be lineaged or it's not Wiccan, or why Shaman is a term that refers to a specific culture and place, and why Druid refers to a certain class in a time and closed culture.

Christianity originally referred to a certain sect of Judaism and later a set of beliefs and practices practiced by the Holy Roman Catholic church, what gives me a right to call myself Christian when originally that referred to a sect of Judaism? What gives me a right to call myself Christian when the Catholic church and Eastern Orthodox church were, for awhile, the only accepted practices and religions that could be called "Christian?"  

[Deoridhe]

1) Christianity, at the very latest, ceased to be a closed tradition in 300 CE when a common written source was decided on. It has since become a more than open tradition that actively recruits people. Wicca has not yet reached either point, and currently it appears it won't due to how it was created as an initiatory tradition.

2) The people who created new sects of Christianity were themselves Christian. People calling themselves "shamans" in the US, and charging huge amounts of money to initiate people into "shamanistic" traditions are not Tuvan. I've spoken to some and they have not known who the Tuvan are. They got the word from Western Anthropologists and other New Age practitioners and, with the exception of one person who uses "Incan Shaman" as his descriptor and is part of the living Incan tradition, tend to be unaffiliated with any tradition or loosely following a weird, quasi-Lakota tradition. The Druidic tradition was broken and largely destroyed centuries ago. Wicca is a living tradition that has, in fact, split as Christianity did into sects founded by Wiccans (see: Alexandrian, etc...).

In other words, sects of Christianity and sects of Wicca are similar. The Tuvan have not broken into sects, so far as I know, and those using their name for their spiritual/religious figure have no relationship with them at all. The Druids we know to little about to speculate about what they did while their tradition was alive, but it certainly is not now, so there is no one to break into sects.