Trump's Christian supporters are unchristian

[lilpixieofterror]

Genesis 6:5, which is why christians believe that god drowned everyone in a flood. Did you know that drowning was one of the worst most agonizing ways to die? Wonder why god didn't just gently put everyone to sleep.

[lilpixieofterror]

So when someone sins say, and god shows mercy to the offender, is that because god is of a just nature, and if he shows justice to the offender, is that also because of gods merciful nature. They can't both be definers of gods inherent nature any more than they could both be definers of your inherent nature. And no, you are not both, you can do either, but you are inherently neither. It defies logic, regardless of what the bible says, or what you think the bible is saying.

[Starlight]

That's not Paul's theology at all, nor is it consistent with the rest of scripture which makes it abundantly clear that righteousness apart from Christ is literally impossible.

Actually the rest of scripture regularly calls people righteous. Psalms and proverbs quite regularly contrast righteous and wicked people. Various individuals are specifically labelled righteous also.

God unequivocally tells us through the prophet Isaiah that "All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away,"

The prophet is contrasting the wickedness of his current generation with the righteousness of past generations. You only need to go back a single verse to see him speak of "those who gladly do right, who remember your ways" that describes previous generations. You need to not rip his words out of context and apply them to all humanity when that is not what he is talking about at all.

and Paul writes in Ephesians that it is "by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast,"

individuals who might or might not boast of doing good works.

Peter writes in his own letters that "[Jesus] himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed."

Yes, Peter uses a metaphor, and says Jesus carried away our sins, don't over-literalize the metaphor.

In order to get your rather novel rewording of Romans 3:21-26 to work, you would have to re-translate not just that passage but the entire book of Romans, and many other passages in the Bible as well since the doctrine of substitution rests on more than just a single, isolated passage.

I think you should indeed reinterpret many parts of Romans as well as the occasional other passage, yes. I think evangelicals mistranslate a number of technical terms as well as have a horrendously implausible interpretation of most of the book of Romans.

I do largely agree with you that the modern evangelical paradigm relies heavily on a particular reading of the book of Romans plus a few other passages. I see that as a negative that it relies so heavily on such a small group of texts within the much larger corpus of the NT. If one focuses on the gospels, for example, one really struggles to arrive at anything approaching the modern evangelical paradigm of salvation.

[Starlight]

Rather, God is perfectly just

Human ideas of justice have changed quite a lot over time. From the nomadic tribes of Israel, to Plato's Republic which laid out his thoughts about justice, to the Roman justice system which became famous across the known world for its thorough codes of laws and rigor, to the 'Lord's/King's justice' of feudal/monarchical European societies, to 20th century human rights tribunals, to John Rawls' acclaimed modern philosophical treatise A Theory of Justice, to the increasing focus on restorative justice over retributive justice in many modern societies today.

When you attribute 'justice' to God or read a biblical translation which calls him 'just', it's worth thinking hard about which exactly of the many ideas and concepts of justice are you ascribing to him, and the extent to which that is you projecting your own ideas into the text. And if you think that you have in your mind some sort of idealized theory and idea of pure 'justice' which you think God conforms to perfectly, then it would seem to me that is just you making things up.

The notion of God as needing perfect justice was introduced into the Western Christian theological tradition by Anselm in the 11th century, and isn't found in the Eastern Christian theological traditions. Anselm conceptualized God as a feudal lord, and during his day when feudal lords felt they were being slighted they took revenge, which they saw as necessary else people would keep slighting them and they would be in danger of losing their position. Their feudal society labelled this snowflake-tendency of being triggered and needing revenge, as "honor" and the more "honorable" the lord, the more triggered they would be when they perceived they were being slighted. God, Anselm asserts without any particular justification, is like an infinitely honorable human feudal lord. So whenever anyone slights God in the least, in even the tiniest respect, he gets infinitely triggered and must revenge them infinitely. In feudal society it was possible to appease an offended snowflake by paying them off. So Anselm casts Jesus as a gift of infinite value given to appease the infinitely angry God.

A few centuries later during the Reformation, the protestant Reformers took Anselm's ideas and recast them in a new metaphor as God as an infinitely just judge who infinitely punishes crimes against him. (Worth noting that no human court has ever considered an infinite punishment to be just for any crime whatsoever, so the entirety of human history of thinking about the concept of justice would judge an infinite punishment to be unjust) So instead of God being an infinitely triggered snowflake like Anselm had thought, God was now instead conceived of as perfectly committed to an obsessive-compulsive extent to the idea of just punishments where 'just' is reinterpreted as 'infinite'. So God was Perfectly Just in the sense that he had a serious and absolute innate Need to dish out punishment and infinite amounts thereof (good luck trying to find that idea in the bible). And Jesus was reinterpreted as a vessel who'd received that infinite punishment and been able to do so because he was infinite. So God the loving father who'd really wanted not to punish humanity and instead forgive them, but had been twitching due to his obsessive compulsive need to dish out some infinite punishments, found a way around his own contradictory desires by dishing out the infinite punishment onto Jesus so he could be merciful and forgiving to humanity like he really wanted. (This is quite different to Anselm's version in the sense that in Anselm's conception Jesus simply offers his obedience life to God as a valuable gift, whereas in this Reformation protestant version God actually punishes Jesus or focuses the world's sins onto Jesus)

And variants of that modern idea of penal substitutionary atonement have dominated modern evangelical thinking in the last 500 years. But IMO it suffers from many problems, including that it makes up some really crazy ideas about what 'justice' is that don't really match to any of the many ideas of justice developed over the millennia and then projects them onto God and pretends he must conform to them infinitely, and then proceeds to project them into the bible. To contrast this modern overemphasis on this weird notion of 'justice' that modern Western evangelicalism developed with the Eastern Christian theological tradition that has never focused on or overemphasized 'justice', it's worth reading this speech by an Eastern Orthodox theologian on the topic of justice and how he thinks Western Christianity has gone bananas on the subject.

[Mountain Man]

individuals who might or might not boast of doing good works.

Yes, Peter uses a metaphor, and says Jesus carried away our sins, don't over-literalize the metaphor.

I think you should indeed reinterpret many parts of Romans as well as the occasional other passage, yes. I think evangelicals mistranslate a number of technical terms as well as have a horrendously implausible interpretation of most of the book of Romans.

I do largely agree with you that the modern evangelical paradigm relies heavily on a particular reading of the book of Romans plus a few other passages. I see that as a negative that it relies so heavily on such a small group of texts within the much larger corpus of the NT. If one focuses on the gospels, for example, one really struggles to arrive at anything approaching the modern evangelical paradigm of salvation.

[Starlight]

Yes, the Bible does call people righteous, but it is only by following God's commands that one is righteous.

So human beings, according to the bible, can in fact act in a way that they get labelled righteous? And they aren't in fact all infinitely sinful? Glad to see you're coming to agree with my biblical interpretation.

When Jesus was asked which commandment was the most important, he said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."

Interesting that the commandments aren't "place your faith in Jesus and his atoning act on the cross for your salvation", isn't it? Instead the commandments are about being 'good people' in the colloquial sense.

Which is to say that if you fail to follow the "great and first commandment" then any subsequent attempt at righteousness through good works will be worthless, like a filthy rag.

Um, that's an interesting made up idea of yours. You seem to have randomly merged two totally different bible sentences together from two different testaments.

Those who obey God's commands, including the commandment to love him with every part of your being, are deemed righteous. Those who reject God and strike out on their own are declared wicked.

Sure. The bible thinks humans who love God and their neighbors are righteous. Glad you agree that it thinks that human behavior leads to people being labelled righteous.

It's generally pretty anti those who reject God, yup. It has a tendency to assume that those who reject God are also bad people who do bad deeds.

There's not a lot of sustained philosophical discussion in the bible on the question of how to conceptualize the group of people who reject God but who love their neighbors. As you say, the bible gives the two 'greatest commandments' of love God and love your neighbor... but there's not a massive amount of focus on the question of those who obey the first commandment and not the second or the second commandment and not the first. To the extent that the bible focuses much on either of those groups it tends to focus on those who obey the first commandment and not the second, and throw a tantrum at them... it doesn't seem to think much of people who are religious but don't love other humans. The topic of those who love other humans but who aren't religious is barely ever touched on.

You want a God who will judge people as "good enough", and so you twist scripture in a way that you think will allow you to "good enough" your way into heaven.

You want a scripture which conforms to the gospel as you happen to have been taught it and happen to like it, and so you twist scripture in a way to force it to conform with your current viewpoint which you see as giving you a free pass to heaven and not require effort on your part that you don't wish to make. See... I also can completely make up motives and ascribe them to you like you can to me.

You seem to be ignoring the fact that I'm an atheist and don't actually believe the teachings of scripture are true, so I'm not trying to twist it to make it say anything in particular. Unlike you, I don't have a horse in the race, and aren't bound to change my life or actions if my interpretation of scripture were to change, I can actually be as objective as possible in my readings of it because I don't see whatever reading I happen to come to as binding on me. In my reading, scripture isn't particularly nice toward atheists... that would be a strange reading for me to take as an atheist if I were really worried about what it thought of me, wouldn't it?

[Mountain Man]

So human beings, according to the bible, can in fact act in a way that they get labelled righteous?

No. We can only conform to God's righteousness by obeying his commands. It is perhaps ironic that true freedom can only come when we give up our freewill to do the will of God the Father.

Interesting that the commandments aren't "place your faith in Jesus and his atoning act on the cross for your salvation", isn't it?

Not really, considering that Jesus acts as our mediator. 1 Timothy 2, "For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time."

There's not a lot of sustained philosophical discussion in the bible on the question of how to conceptualize the group of people who reject God but who love their neighbors. As you say, the bible gives the two 'greatest commandments' of love God and love your neighbor... but there's not a massive amount of focus on the question of those who obey the first commandment and not the second or the second commandment and not the first.

Are you dense? That's the entire theme of the book of James.

[Starlight]

That's the entire theme of the book of James.

Not the entire book, and there's a bit of a focus on it in some of the letters of John too, and Jesus's approach to the Pharisees also falls under the same general topic. But I take your point that there is at least some discussion in the bible of people who love God or say they love God but do not love others sufficiently, even if you and I perhaps disagree over whether it constitutes "a lot" of discussion of it or not. (For me to say something occurs "a lot" in the bible typically means that it's mentioned in virtually every book and the total number of times its discussed is 100 or more, so something like the teaching of love toward others I would say occurs a lot in the bible. Because I'm paranoid about the possibility of misinterpretation when it comes to biblical passages - because I'm aware of theological history and just how much different passages have been misinterpreted at different times - I tend to have a reasonably high bar that has to be met before I agree a teaching is definitely biblical and it occurring in only a handful of verses doesn't meet that threshold because we might just be making mistakes in our interpretations of those handful of verses.)

Would you agree that the issue of people who do good deeds toward others but do not love God gets even an order of magnitude less discussion in the bible (than people who supposedly love God but don't do good deeds), if any at all?

[Tassman]

I see. So they're just instincts.

And what's inherently wrong with ignoring one's instincts?

Nothing per se! But if they are ignored to the detriment of the community of which you are a member, you will be removed from the community or dealt with in other ways.

[Starlight]

I see. So they're just instincts.

Well it's worth noting that moral instincts are a subset of our instincts, not the same as instincts in general. e.g. if I have the instinct to steal something or kill someone to advance my selfish ends, that isn't moral. If I have a 'fight or flight' instinct, neither of those options is necessarily moral. The moral instincts are the subset of the instincts that are connected with herd evolution - they are those that seek to benefit others.

So, the reason that most humans are more moral than not, is because we evolved as herd animals and needed to get along successfully with others and therefore evolved instincts that encouraged that, and evolved brains that get a strong sense of satisfaction from helping others (in addition to other instincts that sometimes help the self at the expense of others that all animals share). But our instincts aren't the definition of morality because we can divide our instincts into those that are selfish and label them immoral instincts and those that are selfless and label them moral instincts. So while evolution provides the historical explanation as to why humans evolved to be kind toward other humans (due to evolving as a herd animal) and why it makes humans happy and brings satisfaction to help others, it doesn't define the word "moral" - the issue of whether or not a given instinct is labelled "moral" is decided on by whether we classify it as helping or hurting others.

[Tassman]

Well it's worth noting that moral instincts are a subset of our instincts, not the same as instincts in general. e.g. if I have the instinct to steal something or kill someone to advance my selfish ends, that isn't moral. If I have a 'fight or flight' instinct, neither of those options is necessarily moral. The moral instincts are the subset of the instincts that are connected with herd evolution - they are those that seek to benefit others.

So, the reason that most humans are more moral than not, is because we evolved as herd animals and needed to get along successfully with others and therefore evolved instincts that encouraged that, and evolved brains that get a strong sense of satisfaction from helping others (in addition to other instincts that sometimes help the self at the expense of others that all animals share). But our instincts aren't the definition of morality because we can divide our instincts into those that are selfish and label them immoral instincts and those that are selfless and label them moral instincts. So while evolution provides the historical explanation as to why humans evolved to be kind toward other humans (due to evolving as a herd animal) and why it makes humans happy and brings satisfaction to help others, it doesn't define the word "moral" - the issue of whether or not a given instinct is labelled "moral" is decided on by whether we classify it as helping or hurting others.

Yes, at bottom, morals are rules of behaviour.

[Charles]

I think the good old Michael Gerson (a Christian by the way for those who think they can turn their deaf ear to those who don't believe) has put some very interesting and relevant words on some of the ideas that has been discussed in this thread:

Consider a recent tweet by Jerry Falwell Jr.: "Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing 'nice guys'. They might make great Christian leaders but the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!"

Where to begin? It is worth noting that for some evangelicals, the pretense of reluctantly supporting Donald Trump only because of the binary choice with Hillary Clinton has been abandoned. Falwell is calling for an extensive effort at Trump cloning. It is not enough that the president is a cruel, nativist, misogynist hothead. Now the local alderman should aspire to his example.

Note the last part: "Instead of being a voice for the weak, Falwell provided an alibi for the strong." I think those alibis are way too common in here, mainly among the Christians who made a deal with "the king" that contradicts what they ought to stand for.

I like his follow up on it:

This is disturbing and discrediting. How can anyone supposedly steeped in the teachings of Jesus be so unaffected by them? The question immediately turns against the questioner. In a hundred less visible ways, how can I be so unaffected by them?

An interesting read.

https://www.berkshireeagle.com/stori...ighting,551896

[NorrinRadd]

I think the good old Michael Gerson (a Christian by the way for those who think they can turn their deaf ear to those who don't believe) has put some very interesting and relevant words on some of the ideas that has been discussed in this thread:

Only vaguely aware of Gerson. Based on the Wikipedia article, he's generally a good neocon guy, albeit kind of a self-aggrandizing wiener.

Regarding the citation:

Consider a recent tweet by Jerry Falwell Jr.: "Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing 'nice guys'. They might make great Christian leaders but the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!"

Where to begin? It is worth noting that for some evangelicals, the pretense of reluctantly supporting Donald Trump only because of the binary choice with Hillary Clinton has been abandoned. Falwell is calling for an extensive effort at Trump cloning. It is not enough that the president is a cruel, nativist, misogynist hothead. Now the local alderman should aspire to his example.

The problem here is that Falwell is not calling for "clones" who reproduce Trump exactly, including his alleged cruelty, nativism, misogyny, and hotheadedness. He only calls for "street fighters" -- leaders who push back aggressively against the press and other liberal fascists. I heartily endorse that call.

Note the last part: "Instead of being a voice for the weak, Falwell provided an alibi for the strong." I think those alibis are way too common in here, mainly among the Christians who made a deal with "the king" that contradicts what they ought to stand for.

That bit about being a "darling of the king" is a reasonable caution by Gerson, I suppose. I'll have to mull it over. Would Gerson prefer a completely adversarial relationship?

As for the "voice for the weak" part, I dunno. I think a lot of times our initial reaction to stories like that is to question their validity.

I like his follow up on it:

This is disturbing and discrediting. How can anyone supposedly steeped in the teachings of Jesus be so unaffected by them? The question immediately turns against the questioner. In a hundred less visible ways, how can I be so unaffected by them?

I think the first question is stupid. We don't see Jesus going out of his way to criticize Herod or Pilate or Caesar. His cousin John the Baptizer did, and paid with his life. His friend and disciple John did, but only in obscure apocalyptic symbolism. Peter and Paul generally urged obedience to the government and prayer for those in power. It's mainly the Prophets and Proverbs of the Obsolete Covenant, more so than the "teachings of Jesus," that would have us rebuke those in power and raise our voices for the weak.

[Mountain Man]

So they're just instincts.

And what's inherently wrong with ignoring one's instincts?

Nothing per se! But if they are ignored to the detriment of the community of which you are a member, you will be removed from the community or dealt with in other ways.

The point you seem to be missing is that if atheism is true, then nothing is truly immoral, and we have no duty to act one way as opposed to another. It might be beneficial to conform to social norms, but if one is sufficiently powerful, or sufficiently careful, then even that's not necessary.

Source: Can We Be Good Without God?

https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writ...d-without-god/

© Copyright Original Source

[Mountain Man]

An interesting read.

https://www.berkshireeagle.com/stori...ighting,551896

And still not a single scriptural reference to support his point of view. So explain to me again why I as a Christian should care about his opinion?