Christianity is Morally Bankrupt

No, you just can't give up on your redefinition of the conversation. Your pedantry is in not giving even the slightest bit of charity to what the OP means and instead focusing on a precise definition of a phrase "moral bankruptcy", for which you primary source is the almighty wikipedia. The OP is so obviously about the doctrines of Christianity when you read, you know, all of the words together as a whole bunch. People tend to write them that way because it is really hard to express an idea like that with one or two words. You have decided to have an argument with the title of the thread and not the theme of the OP.Regarding the notion that those beliefs can be destructive, a destructive belief could simply cause a person to wallow in ignorance and live their entire life with unnecessary guilt and anxiety. It doesn't have to cause them to do a damn thing. It certainly could and likely does, but I did not join this conversation to talk about the evil actions of people and how they are motivated or not by religion.The ideas themselves can be evaluated and reasonable people can talk about their value and purpose. No. If you want to do that you can go start up a different conversaion with someone else. I joined this thread to talk about ideas and their value which is exactly what the OP is asking for given a reasonable reading of it.

And nearly all of those choices are temporary because we are temporal creatures with a focus on the present. Lewis is speaking of an eternity in hell. If hell does exist, I can guarantee the people who are in there do not continue to choose to be there. It is unfathomable to me, how a just person could come up with the idea that a choice made in a singular moment in time, could have eternal consequences and moreover it is the existence of that choice that somehow makes the fallout okay. It is not only evil, it is apologetic for that evil. You had me on the first two sentences. Then you packed a whole bunch of assumptions into that one last sentence. That therefore morality has a standard and that the standard is eternal is a totally unevidenced product of a particular belief system.In my belief system, morality is a product of consensus. I don't expect anyone else to 100% agree with me on that but they don't have to. I just happen to think that the world actually functions more akin to my sense of the origins of morality due to how dramatically it changes with human progress.

I have. Message 113And the vast vast majority of the OP remains below that statement. Those words describe what he is using to evaluate Christianity. He is not talking about actions he is talking about ideas. So yes, once again you are pedantically correct. He does REPEAT the words from the title in the text of the OP, but you completely missed my criticism in that what you are doing is focusing on a simple phrase "morally bankrupt" rather than totality and context of all the words used to compose the OP. You are not reading for understanding. You are reading in a way to narrow the focus of this topic to a point that it becomes an idea both easy to dismiss and totally irrelevant.The point remains PD, that the person who started this thread, and the people who have joined in on his side such as myself and Tangle, are actually interested in the THEME of the OP which is addressing the value of the ideas expressed as common Christian beliefs. Us, the people evaluating it and debating it. No one was so naive that they would think that this conversation was going to change a believer's evaluation of their faith. If an argument being winnable was a precondition for having a discussion on this forum then there would be no threads. You are the one issuing demands, that people answer to your framing of the problem around actions instead of ideas. You are the one who started the conversation on this thread with me by proclaiming me as off topic regarding moral bankruptcy. I think it is perfectly reasonable for me, rather than let you get away with your shell game, to point out that you are desiring a different conversation than everyone else.Edited by Jazzns, : Reduced my own pedantry.

You asked about a definition so I linked back to where I gave one.Now you ask about when I addressed actions and so I will also link back to where I dealt with that....in a reply.... to you. Message 186
I have barely had a chance to discuss the issues of the morality of ideas. The one main point I have made thus far regarding agency and intent seems to me like a fruitful foil for discussion. That is a far cry from the trivialization you are applying in attempt to diminish criticism. I for one have not tried to lump beliefs together, just because I believe the term "Christianity" can mean something in a proper context without needing to be sliced to death with caveats doesn't mean I don't realize that there are exceptions including the people who have joined this thread such as you, GDR, and jar. I have even said as much (Message 184). And that is a fine criticism to make of Tangle's argument! Welcome to the debate about the ideas! Well no. Tangle did not just say the ideas were immoral for no reason. He gives a reason involving the circumstances of someone's birth. Its right there in his words that you decided to quote. That is the exact opposite of what you are claiming, once again. Yea. As it turns out, some things can both be fake AND immoral. There very first line you wrote to me in this thread was to suggest that I wasn't talking about moral bankruptcy. How you were able to do that considering what I had said up to that point is only possible according to your narrowing of what YOU considered eligible for discussion under your wikipedia definition. You did not reply to the points I was trying to make at all. Because you were arguing about the technicality of whether Jesus applies as vicarious redemption while my point in my response to Nukes was about why it is possible for an idea such as vicarious redemption can be called immoral.I could have used a different example of what some people consider vicarious redemption but there is the REALLY handy one available that happened to be related to this thread. We can argue if the case of Jesus is a case of vicarious redemption. I have made the argument in Message 184 that in fact many Christians do believe that it is. That, I believe is enough to have a conversation about the morality of this idea that many Christians do accept. Shouldn't that have been your first clue to perhaps be a little bit more charitable with what was being asked in the OP? He had no idea about your wikipedia definition and thus was not following you on your tightrope walk. As for correcting your impression, I think I have been trying to do that for quite a few replies now. That is because I don't particularly care about creating a perfect definition of moral bankruptcy. I am perfectly happy with a general understanding of what is being asked in the OP taking it as a whole. It is about ideas common to many forms of Christianity and their morality as ideas.Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

Compared to eternity, the lifetime of a human being is essentially an instant. How many examples do we need of people who within less than a 20 year time frame go from being a selfish and destructive youth to a more wise and able adult? What would another 100, 1000 years do to the psyche of a human being to make a choice about something as daunting as ETERNITY if they could live that long.Lets use space as an analogy for time. Compared to the eternity, our galaxy is infinitely small. If you then started out from earth and before you left orbit you were on a trajectory that wrong by smaller than our instruments could detect. If you could not course correct, then at distances akin to the size of our galaxy (which remember is infinitely small) you will go wildly off course. You would be considered a fool, worse than an idiot, to go our on this finite journey without the ability to change directions some vast distance along the way, and in ALL of that, we still only talking about things that are limited.What you are suggesting, is that the trajectory of a miserably small human lifetime, can say something about how a human will be for an immeasurable amount of time after that.It is plainly ridiculous. Perhaps. Where there is a difference in morality between those two things I think it is trivial and hardly worth considering. I think things such as morals being universal, eternal, standard, is trying way too hard to make a point that only needs to be made if you are trying to prop up an idea, such as God, that desperately needs the support. It makes morality something that is really hard to define because it has to be so precise.But the morality we use on a day to day basis is much more important to us. It is the morality we agree upon that we value the most because we don't have to look at unevidenced things to apply it.

I don't know, maybe you just decided to pick my post as a jumping off point to make a comment about the general course the conversaion was taking, but what it looked like to me was that you were complaining that I wasn't talking about the morality of the ideas which is exactly what I had been talking about with Nukes. I tried to clear that up with you by saying exactly what I thought, that nothing you said had to do with the points I raised about agency. I still don't even know if you have an issue with what I said regarding agency because after I gave you the defintion of agency that I was using, you stopped talking about it. I never said that you don't get it. I think you get it just fine. I think you see a way to strengthen the landscape by which you argue your position by narrowing the debate to the morality of actions instead of what the author of the OP was asking which is about the morality of ideas. I think what you are doing is very deliberate and reasoned.Also, I am trying to fix the issue. I think the problem IS THE FOCUS on such a precise definition of moral bankruptcy involving actions, to choke out the discussion about the morality of ideas. How can you say that I don't want to help? Is it just because I am comfortable with not having an exact replacement for your wikipedia definition of a single phrase from the OP? If so, what is wrong with that?Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

And what is to suggest that for some people this tiny sampling of their life trajectory doesn't change for the WORSE once they are found to be suitable to this new society? Is everyone who was on a "good" trajectory for 80 years of a life going to be "good" for eternity? Or will they not be ALLOWED to be any different?If free will is to mean anything, you cannot make accurate assumptions about infinity with a sample size of 80 years. This is all the more reason to think that this concept is immoral. This can ONLY be true, if something from the outside is applying a different standard for morality than what we use in our practical lives. In reality, the important moral questions we face are so far beyond this distinction as to make it laughable. Hardly anyone practically considers the silent giver vastly more moral than the public giver. If anything, this highlights the fact that the God doing this judging has a skewed sense of importance. If it is, there is no evidence that it comes from anything other than ourselves.