Grace Life Church supporters tear down the fences
(twitter.com)
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How do you know what is moral without God?
Have you noticed that nobody can do that?
If you believed in God you would know peace and experience true freedom. Hating the Jews and seeing their large noses poking into every facet of your life is not freedom.
I had to figure it out. What benefits me? What benefits others? What benefits the life and world around me? What hurts them? What hurts the world around me? How do I go about living my life in a way that is most beneficial to me and the environment I exist in, or that will help develop a world that is like that, even if I'm not currently in it.
The strongest compliment I can give to Christianity is that our conclusions have surprising overlap.
You're right, they can't. Now it's time to recognize the true imperative of the atheist: live with it.
You will fuck it up. You'll fail. You'll hurt people. You'll hurt yourself. No one will ever necessarily forgive you, even if you ask, if that's ever an option. Instead you're far more likely to hurt someone and never ever see them again without ever having had the option to actually repent or ask forgiveness for your mistakes.
What if there is no afterlife? Really, what are implications of that? The implications are actually quite horrifying if you've never actually recognized them. Imagine what it really means to bicker with your wife over something stupid to find out she was killed on the way to work. You never got the chance to apologize, make amends, or even re-orient your life and focus on the important things.
You wasted it. You chose to waste it, and now gone forever.
When you write the story of your life in permanent ink, you'd better start choosing wisely. You'll never be able to take any of it back.
It starts to really make you value forgiveness. You start to be more careful with your words and deeds. You start to re-prioritize what's important much sooner than at someone's death bed. You start too look into the future to see what's coming, and you start to avoid what you know will cause you terrible pain. Why, if you're careful, if you're smart, if you square yourself away, you might just end up being a good person. And if you really learn what's important, and you really tell the truth, and you live by truth, and you embrace mercy, stoicism, and strength; well shit, you might actually be someone that people can be proud to have known.
I don't care what some supposedly divine figure judges of my life. Fuck that person. I leave a legacy based on the people who's lives I've impacted. My work, their memories of me, the way I changed their lives, that is my legacy. Not the judgement of some allegedly perfect being. Fuck other people's judgement, I know what I did, and I left it on the hearts and minds of the people around me.
I get to know that because I wasn't given a second chance. And so it became truly valuable to me.
Lies. If I believed in God, I would enslave myself to those who claim to know him better than me. I would not do my bidding, or my family's bidding, or my community's bidding, or my friend's bidding, or even this supposed God's bidding. I would do their bidding. The bidding of those who claim to know better because they adorn themselves in titles, authority, and cosmetic garb.
I would know nothing of freedom because I would know nothing but enslavement. I would know nothing of freedom because I would know nothing of responsibility. I would know nothing of freedom because I would know nothing but the coddled protection and comforting lies of men seeking to enrich themselves at my expense and re-affirm their own sense of self worth off of my back.
And peace? Never. I would know only the orders and demands of my betters. I would know only war because I would be sent to fight it while my betters enjoyed their peace at my expense. I would live for someone else, I would die for someone else, and I would have nothing for me and mine.
My only dream, enslaved to religion and idolatry (for all religion is idolatry of one form or another), would be to say that I died well at the behest of others. But I could never have lived well. I wouldn't have ever known how to live, because it would never have been my life.
Obviously. It too is a form of enslavement. Total reactionary attitudes are fundamentally an enslavement to resentment and hatred.
How do you know what is best for you, or for others?
I’m not God. I don’t know what happens when you die. I’m familiar with your thinking though, because I used to be an Atheist too.
Driven by fear, you mean.
I’m talking about real Christianity. God is within us. It is written in the Bible to let no man teach you, but hardly any Christians are aware of it because they do not really know God.
Instead you are a slave to the idea of freedom. I bet you do not feel free.
The truth is that all are slaves, knowingly or not. The question is only, who do you serve?
I don't, that's why I didn't say that. No one knows what's "best" for others, and it's a damn struggle to understand what's best for you. I try to do right by myself and the people around me to the best of my abilities at any given moment.
I do not accept any anointed vision or grand plan of what someone else, who doesn't know me, and doesn't care about me, claims thinks is best for me by making an argument to authority to a literary device.
You don't know what happens when you die, but you claim to be a Christian. Are you ignorant of your own beliefs, or just lying to me?
No, by consequence. There are one of two options in the real world: ignore consequence and responsibility, and be bludgeoned by consequence until your apologetics and rationalization is broken by force; or take heed of consequence and adapt.
Consequence can also be positive, even inspirational. The reward of your work.
When you refuse to accept consequences and take responsibility, you diminish your success, and blind yourself to danger.
Non-sense. Christians aren't true Christians because they don't accept the moral relativism of revealing God's will within themselves.
How do you even know that I have not found God within me by doing exactly what I'm doing? God is not real, and I don't need it either. Yet, I live a moral life that most Christians would consider pious. How do you know that my rejection of God did not lead me to a more godly path in line with His plan, despite opinions. How do you know that my anti-theism is not more pious and Christian than most Christians, particularly when you engage in such relativism of morality?
How could you even challenge my introspection?
That's a hell of a statement.
I'm afraid we must remain bitter enemies, because I do genuinely believe in the value of human freedom and individual liberty. You see it as, apparently, a delusion that only enslavement to your unknowable, untouchable, uninteractable allegory which is interepreted by other men can cure people of.
I do not accept your apologetics to your own enslavement to men who claim to speak on behalf of a God you will never find.
I do, because I earned it, and earn it every day.
I asked how you know what is moral. You replied that you had to figure it out by determining what is best for you, or others, or the world, etc. Now you are saying you don’t in fact know that. But if you do not, then you cannot know what is moral, according to your definition. How can you even do your best to be moral when you say you don’t know what morality is?
No, I am just a real Christian.
Morality is not relative.
I know by your answers to my questions.
I told you, most Christians don’t know God, so they wouldn’t know morality either. It’s no wonder they would consider an Atheist to be pious. The Pope is down with the gays, so clearly calling yourself Christian doesn’t mean what it used to.
Why would God want you to reject him? God is simple and easy. If you were following his plan, you would know it. (and you would know him)
There is no such thing as more or less moral. This is secular thinking. You are either moral or you are not. I would put you on par with most Christians in that they have the same faith in God that you do, meaning none at all. They believe about him, but not in him.
That’s too bad, but not unexpected.
I don’t go to a church, or follow any man. Is it really so hard to imagine a Christian that doesn’t listen to others to learn about God? If that’s the main reason you’re an atheist, then I’d say that’s a mistake, but it’s your life.
How so?