Morality without god

So tomorrow God could do another miracle, like making a badger play the bassoon, and this would again change "the circumstances we are in with respect to the Law", for example making it OK to be gay?

yaaa umm...no. Don't pat your back too hard there Tangle. Have you considered why scientifically speaking no one calls "heat" the absence of cold? Its because it takes no energy to generate cold, but the same is not said for heat. All that is needed to make something cold is to remove the heat source. Light is the source and all you need to do to get darkness is remove the light source. Darkness is not a substance, it is the absence of light. Evil is the absence of something not the existence of something else.Likewise good is the source and the absence of good is evil.

Well, the WHOLE point of the Old Testament was preparation for Christ, the promise of His coming and so on (Jesus said it was all about Him in Luke 24), therefore all about the fulfillment of the Law through Him to save His people from eternal damnation. His coming was not just "another miracle" in other words, but the whole plan of Redemption from the beginning. Gays may have forgiveness in Christ if they repent, but as I said, the Law has not changed, homosexuality is still a sin worthy of death and without repentance an unhappy eternity awaits.I myself have the question whether outside of repentance and belief in Christ Sabbath-breaking remains a sin in the same way. I haven't found a discussion of that anywhere.AbE: Interestingly I just ran across Calvin's claim that the Sabbath was never for all people, but only for the people of God. He seems to have been a lone voice for that point of view, however, as most take the view that the Sabbath was in place from the Creation itself, because God rested from His work on the seventh day. So if I don't accept Calvin's view I still have the question whether the unbelieving world is also held responsible for the Sabbath as all are for all the moral laws.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Well, that certainly is a comfort. And so very compassionate. Especially toward a behavior that might very well be proven to have a biological, genetic basis, rather than being a matter of "personal choice" or "free will." In effect, God is saying, "All humans are born into the world as wicked, evil sinners, but some more so than others!" His manipulations of our genes at conception provide some people with extra hurdles to overcome on their path to salvation - mysterious ways, to be sure.It's very much like saying that "people of color" are morally inferior to white people. In fact, that's another attitude that found support in numerous espousals of Christian doctrine. The religious stance on this issue has been changing, of course - indeed, the Mormons received new revelations from God just a few decades ago, to let them know that black people were entitled to do (almost) everything that white people could do in the Mormon church! But I gather you would say the Mormons are wrong on this point, because it would imply that God has actually changed His mind a bit.Your stated assessment of homosexuality, I think, goes beyond being Christian. It's downright Islamic! You might want to look a little more closely at how the Bible is interpreted by those Christian sects that allow lesbians to serve as pastors...As for the applicability of your God's "law" about the Sabbath to people who view your God as a figment of imagination, well... if you can provide firm, sensible, objective reasons - based on evidence rather than supernatural claims - for requiring everyone to set aside one day out of seven as "downtime", I'll have no problem with that.It actually sounds like an idea that would have merit as a "strong recommendation" (AbE: heck, why not go for 2 days out of 7?), but requiring it by law seems overly coercive. (AbE: Then again, making this a requirement for employers yields a net reduction of coercion.)(AbE: Faith, regardless of what you might think or assert you meant by your "worthy of death" comment, I feel compelled to say that I view this type of comment as complicit in and culpable for every occurrence of suicide by homosexual youths. You have made a hateful, despicable statement - you should be ashamed, and you deserve all the shaming you receive, for having made that statement. You were wrong to say it. This is not a negotiable matter.)Edited by Otto Tellick, : (I couldn't let Faith off with just mild ridicule.)Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.Edited by Otto Tellick, : (Had to rethink the notion of "coercion" relative to "resting".)

I believe it is most likely demonically inspired myself. I'm certainly aware that homosexuals experience having no choice in the matter, that it's just something that happens to them. Many sins are described as punishable by death in the OT, so I don't know where you are getting your assessment of some more than others. I would agree that homosexuality is a particularly difficult case, but there are solutions if people are willing to pursue them. But not based on the Bible, which is the only true authority for Christian belief. The Bible is clear that all human races go back to Adam and Eve and are all brothers and sisters. The Mormons were wrong from the beginning. They aren't Christians. They believe in a false God, a false Christ, a false salvation, so nothing they say about race has any Christian basis either. I'm well aware of all those developments and they are all apostate, all deny the clear meaning of scripture. The only source I'm aware of is the Bible, which you apparently reject. But perhaps you are aware that it wasn't very long ago, a matter of four or five decades, that stores were all closed on Sunday in America, perhaps elsewhere in "Christendom" as well. Well, the Bible is the Bible, you take it or leave it. Or twist it to suit yourself if that's your thing of course. It's in the Bible, OT, that's the only basis for my comment, I didn't write the Bible. As long as I'm true to God I know it is He who is the hated one and I am honored to share in His shame.People who are struggling with homosexuality should be given all the help possible of course.Would you agree with me that there seems to be an increase in the incidence of homosexuality over the last few decades in the West? I believe that can be explained from the first chapter of Romans, which appears to outline the degeneration of a culture from the knowledge of God through various stages, homosexuality being the last stage. Having stores open on the Sabbath was one of the early stages, banning prayer from the schools, legalizing abortion, bringing pornography under the first amendment, banning the Ten Commandments from public display and all the rest of it, are all part of the degeneration of America and the West in general from a previous acknowledgment of God, all a coming under of God's judgment.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Then why should the victims of the acts of demons get punished? where is the justice in that?

But you are responsible for your acceptance of the Bible's claims as "truth," and when its statements are demonstrably unethical, your deliberate support of those statements makes your acceptance and promulgation of them unethical as well. You are among the many "faithful Christians" who are to blame for the abominable rate of suicide among teenagers who happen to be homosexual. Let that sink in.I don't expect this to sink in, but it has to be said: the Bible contains unethical statements - they appear in abundance in Leviticus. By attributing these statements to an "omni-benevolent" God, the authors of the Bible were not simply creating an irreconcilable self-contradiction. They were lying. Naturally, you are entitled by your "free will" to choose to believe them. You are not entitled to respectful consent from others for making that choice. The Mormons were just the most obvious example - we don't have to go back but a few more decades to find "mainstream" Protestants using "The Real Bible" to justify racism, just as many are using it today to sustain a morally bankrupt prejudice against homosexuals. Sure, the Bible was used by both sides of the slavery/abolition and Jim Crow / Civil Rights debate - all that shows is that the Bible alone is woefully inadequate as a foundation for moral guidance. I would agree that the number of homosexuals in the world (not just in the West) has increased. But the author(s) of Romans were clueless, and what they said is irrelevant, quite apart from whether or not there's any truth at all in the claims being made there.It's really quite simple: so far as we can tell, at any given time, there's a particular probability that a child will be born with hormonal components that lead to homosexual attraction. This means that in any given generation, a particular percentage of children will become homosexual. As the population increases, the number of homosexuals will likewise increase.When I was born, the U.S. population was somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 million people. Today, it's pretty close to 320 million. So I would expect there are about twice as many homosexual people in the U.S. today relative to when I was born. Doubling in a little less than 60 years is a big increase. It has nothing to do with predictions of "end times" or other myths about decline. On the contrary, it's a correlate of continuous growth, a sign of general prosperity. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this (apart from increased rates of pollution, greenhouse gases, depletion of farmable land and fresh water, etc).AbE: I forgot to mention... How about just letting them be, allowing them to live their lives in a manner commensurate with how you live your own life, with the same rights and protections under law? How much effort would it cost you to simply stop vilifying them, stop referring to them as "demon-possessed", and stop trying to "cure" them? That would be a far better solution to the problem, in so many ways.It is certainly not incumbent on you to "help" them by forcing constraints on their behavior, especially when the main thing they have to "struggle with" is the prejudicial and demeaning treatment they get from people who share your beliefs.Edited by Otto Tellick, : (added content as noted)Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.

That aside, could we clear up the question of morality. Morality, we are told, is unchanging. Therefore one of the following must be the case:* It is not immoral to pick up sticks on Saturday, and it never was.* It was immoral to pick up sticks on Saturday, and it still is.Can we find out which is the case? Either seems to raise certain difficulties.

So if I had a box with no heat in it, its would be perfectly cold inside; if it had no light in it, it would be completely dark ... and if it had nothing good in it, then it would contain pure evil? That's a strange idea. For example, suppose the box was empty.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, of course I credit God with opening my eyes, not myself for "accepting" anything, but just to go along with your view of it, OK, I'm happily "responsible" then because I know it to be Truth. But of course I know there is nothing unethical in anything God does, and that such a belief is blasphemy, the "enmity to God" scripture says we all have before we are saved. I read the Bible to learn from it and to be judged by it, not to judge it as you do. You can't intimidate me that way. It's this degenerate society that is responsible for such things, for the homosexuality itself and for the suicides. I almost laughed out loud at the very idea I would ever feel I was "entitled to respectful consent" from anyone here. The lack of fear of God is hair raising. I didn't say "number," I said "incidence." He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh....And blah de blah blah blah. Again, I didn't not say "number," I said "incidence." But you go on and on as if I did. Uh huh, and that's the very thinking that has brought us to this degenerate state. It's only going to get worse, but I suppose you'll blame that on natural causes too. Or maybe on us Christians, we seem to be a favorite target for finger-pointing accusatory denunciations these days. So down down down went the West under God's judgments.AND THEN YOU ADDED THE FOLLOWING: You know, all I said was that people who are STRUGGLING with homosexuality should be given all the help possible. I did not imply that it should be forced on anyone. I've never had a problem with unbelievers choosing to live as homosexuals. There is no need to make an issue of it. BUT what has happened is they are forcing their beliefs on the rest of us, demanding legal accommodations and marching in parades and forcing us all to do THEIR will. Besides being an affront to people who believe it is sin, when laws are put in place to make us all regard them as normal and even sanction their marrying, which could yet happen across the nation, that brings God's judgment down on all our heads.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Thank you for refocusing the discussion, Doctor, and please excuse my excursions. I fully share your concerns on the question of gathering sticks on Saturday. (Or should it be Sunday, now that Christ has done something to change everything without changing anything?)Actually, I think I may have heard at least one self-reported Christian express the notion that God could in fact alter the morality of picking up sticks on the Sabbath (whichever day that might be), but I may have misunderstood, and in any case I have no way to tell whether it was a "true" Christian presenting this view...Still, there was a particular term used in the explanation: "progressive revelation" - yes, I'm pretty sure that was the term. (There seems to be a relevant wikipedia page for it.) Has anyone else heard of this? If I understand it properly (and there's plenty of room for doubt on that point), it would seem to be relevant to the current thread. Of course, it also raises "certain difficulties."(Maybe it has already been mentioned somewhere in the previous 1000 messages? If so, please accept my apologies - I've been absent from the forum for some time, so I might have missed it.)

It WAS a sin to pick up sticks on Saturday if you were one of God's people the Israelites, but it no longer is a sin for God's people the Christians or anybody else as far as I know.

Progressive Revelation as far as I understand it and believe it applies to an orthodox understanding of the Bible, and i'm not entirely sure of that, but just for the sake of argument say it does, has no implication whatever of God's CHANGING anything, it's only an accumulation or building up of knowledge from revelation to revelation, a deepening of the revelation of the Messiah to come with new facets to be appreciated. If it is used to imply change other than that brought about by the actual appearance of the Messiah then it's not within Christian orthodoxy.

Spoken like a true fascist. That's the kind of certainty that causes people to kill other people "for God." (It's yet another point illustrating an "Islamic fervor" in your practice of Christianity.) Another thing you didn't say - or provide - was "evidence". If there is evidence of an increasing proportion of homosexuals in the population (I don't know whether or not this is the case - it's not impossible), the real explanation will be found in genetic drift - a gradual shift in the mixing of alleles.Looking for demons as causal agents (let alone trying to alter their influence) isn't going to get you anywhere - except perhaps into much-needed psychiatric help to address your delusions.

Well here's how it works. Demonic influence is part of God's judgment. Demons acquire rights to influence and possess people based on the degree of sin among us. It all goes back to when Satan deceived Eve and earned the right to become the "ruler of this world" along with all his demon hordes who set themselves up all over the planet as the "gods" and "goddesses" of various religions, demanding propitiations and worship and gifts and sacrifices and whatnot.Since Christ came the demons have been somewhat subdued, to a great degree in the Christian West, and their strategy here has been to convince us that they don't even exist. Clever, huh? But over the last few decades we've been rejecting Christianity, allowing all kinds of sins to proliferate in the society, legalizing many of them and so inviting God's judgment against us more and more.The great influx of Eastern religious gurus in the 70s brought hordes of demons into our midst, and the more we entertain such demonic religions and vilify Christianity and legalize sin the more demons we get.As always the only solution to God's judgments is repentance, turning back to Him, etc etc etc. That's available to everyone. If it isn't done we just get more judgment, more sin, more evils, more demons.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.