Grace Life Church supporters tear down the fences
(twitter.com)
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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?
No, I didn't and I was careful not to. I don't know what's best for others. Just what might benefit them.
No one can know anything that is objectively moral because such a thing does not exist. I do my best to live what I believe to be a moral life by being ethical through causing minimal harm and coercion, while attempting to benefit others within reason. It has to be constant decision making process. I must consider ethics and morality within my decisions.
I'll take that as you admitting you are lying.
So you claim that everyone will somehow look into themselves, and find a universal, objective, morality? When has that ever happened between even 2 people? You must either accept subjectivity and subjective morality, or you must reject subjective interpretation and accept an objective written code that can't be subjectively understood.
Then no one that exists is moral.
You expect to have an objective and absolute morality which you claim can be found through subjective introspection. Not only is that not possible, but even if it were, it could not be complete. No one is capable of understanding a complete moral code, let alone being consistent to one. No human can develop a complete moral system and be consistent to it. This is simply not possible (assuming your morality has any basis in logic). This can actually be proven mathematically to be the case, but I don't need to go even that far, since I can point out there has never been a human alive that is without sin by the Christian standard, not even Jesus.
Where you might complain that my morality isn't objective, at least mine can exist.
However, I suspect that this idea of being 'either moral or not' is probably an even worse concept than a completely unreasonable system. It's more likely an excuse, using God as a crutch.
If you can't be more or less moral, and you assert that you are a moral person, then we also get to discount your actual actions because they will not make you less or more moral. You get to assert that you are a good person, and then you get to do whatever you want and spin whatever necessary apologetics you can muster to defend your rationalization of your terrible behavior as a moral person. After all, who would question it? You've asserted that you're objectively moral, and you looked into yourself and found that God thinks you're moral to, so who is anyone to disagree with God? Convenient.
It's hard to imagine that I could find a Christian so prideful that he can claim to know that morality is objective and absolutely defined, while only finding that by "looking into himself" and then not referencing any objective material whatsoever. You've effectively made yourself God. Somehow you know, and don't know, what morality is, but it's absolutely objective, and you found it without doing any actual research into anything.
Because I have to make the choices myself. I have to live with the consequences of may actions. I have to study the results and learn what it tells me. There is no forgiveness and no justice. I must simply make hard choices about what is right without relying on a god to push my decisions off on. I must take full and ultimate responsibility for my actions and their consequences. Whether I benefit myself, benefit others, hurt myself, or hurt others, it all becomes information that I have to process and refine so that I can make a better decision the next time.
I don't get to pass off my responsibility to anyone else, let alone a literary figure. The responsibility is mine and only mine to bare. The work never ends. Being good isn't something you can assert you are, you have actually have to do good, and it also requires that you know good, and that you know evil as well. That means I don't get to rely on someone to tell me, I have to learn it. Each experience feeds me knowledge to learn what is right and wrong, and hopefully in the grand scheme of things, if I have done right in my life, my actions will have spoken for the success and benefit of myself and those around me. As I act in a moral way, I should see myself and those around me benefit from my actions, beliefs, and values. I must be becoming more moral if my time with people reduces needless suffering and imparts some significant level of value to them, and happens to benefit me as well.