When you see pictures of Jesus praying...

While I understand what your're saying and generally applaud the sentiment, you cannot escape from the fact that Christian religions in all their flavors - Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Coptic - profess to be the one, true, and only way to achieve salvation and enlightenment. In itself, that claim is an explicit statement of moral and ethical superiority - a claim that is shared by no other world religion except the very closely-related Muslim faith. Issues of Christian (and Muslim) moral uniqueness stem from there.

Thanks for that, Billy. That struck me as a really honest answer and also rather atypical. In my personal experience, most Christians that I've encountered seem to believe that they are indeed more moral as a result of their faith, perhaps because their sins somehow mean less because they are forgiven.

The question that your reply raises for me is this... of what practical use are faith and grace if they don't make you more moral? Morality benefits everyone around you. Faith and grace do not. They seem to be more about getting a ticket to the afterlife, and if so, how is that of benefit to anyone but yourself?

Don't confuse morality with salvation. They are two distinctly different things.

Islam and Christianity being the same is certainly not what anyone in either sect claim but that is entirely a different subject.

I agree that "some" Christians are misguided and think this way but the vast majority in my experience do not.


Christianity does not give you a "free pass" to sin. There should be signs of a true believer being among other things repentance, which is literally turning away from sin.

Maybe I can say it another way. It does not make me better than you Chip, but it should make me have a desire to turn away from my own sins and yes, a desire to live a more moral life that I did before. My Christianity should make me better than I was before because I am aware of my sins, and seek to improve myself. Again, this does not make me better than you or anyone else, but perhaps makes me better that I was before.

It is impossible for anyone to live a life free of sin. We all fall short and are in the same boat. Faith gives me the desire to follow the teachings of the one I believe in and the Jesus' teachings speak at length about loving God, loving one another, turning away from sin and the result most likely being living a more moral life than I did before. This desire to do so in no way makes me better than you, it hopefully will make me better than I was before.

I will go back to how I ended the last post. Christians are perhaps the worst of sinners. They believe… yet still sin.

And THIS is precisely where I have problems with your faith. I find it not only possible to live a life free of sin, I find it incredibly simple to do so.

Exactly why do you feel that your religion and faith get to determine the definition of sin?

As I've stated --I neither believe nor do I sin.

Why wouldn't they? They're taught that it's forgiveable. Acceptance of Jesus is like getting a do over. Belief is more important than deed. I don't really understand how that could possibly promote better behavior.



Your explanation still intones that people who have faith are more "aware" of their immorality (I'll use that instead of "sin" since it's not a dogmatic concept), and presumably are better equipped to not be immoral as a result. But... you also admit that Christians aren't more moral than everyone else (thank you for that). Doesn't that seem to indicate that as a self-help program Christianity isn't particularly effective, or that morality isn't the real goal? If it was, wouldn't Christians be demonstrably more moral than non-Christians?

Formidable! What's your secret?

coco

easy! I don't believe in sin.

Yeah, that was the only answer I could come up with.

I guess my definition of sinning would be: Doing something you know is wrong but doing it anyway.

coco

Instead of thinking of that as a sin, I tend to think of that as selling out one's values.

Um... OK. But beyond the fact that I did not confuse morality with salvation, nor stated that Islam and Christianity were the "same", neither of these comments have anything to do with the point I was making.

I'm just impressed that this is a thread about religion that's lasted this long without people flaming eachother and it getting locked.

I'm in the same boat as Kendra there. Morality is a word that means different things to different people, therefore I don't think that since there's really any sort of a basis of what's right and wrong without someone telling you this, that there really can't be any religions saying that this is moral and that this isn't. Because after all, what makes those morals better than anyone elses?

What, then, if I don't happen to think of murder as something that goes against my values, depending on who I knock off - in a case where, say, I think someone deserves to be dead. "He needed killin'!" So then the murder isn't a sin?

coco

If you think like that, I'm convinced you could become President.

Why not? Even for Christians murder isn't always a sin, in the crusades knights were told so, abortion clinic bombers are convinced that killing people who run abortion clinics is not only not a sin, but morally expected of them, and so on and so forth.

There was a saying, "Kill one person and you're a murderer, kill a thousand and you're a king". Says something about what killing really does when it comes to reprecussions and how it's viewed in a society.

You're right. I think that the idea of "sin" and "going against one's values" is actually just the same thing. In both cases, you are doing something you know is wrong, yet you're doing it anyway.

I guess it comes down to one's likelihood of using or willingness to use the word "sin" in relation to doing something you know is wrong or not, which isn't a very important question, really. The word isn't used these days that often, outside of church, whereas values is a word often used.

coco

Maybe you all noticed that religion issues caused a LARGE amount of victims along the centuries... And it's still going on.

Crusades, and inquisition, and heretics are only a few examples.

I find bitterly ironic that so many could kill other people following rules stating that we are all brothers, and we should love each other.