You can believe in an omnipotent sky daddy if you want, bit silly if you ask me. Teaching your kids such a thing exists is a bigger problem for me.
Right... You can believe that falling off a skyscraper is dangerous or that you need to eat properly to stay healthy, but teaching it to kids? That's a problem. What if they actually follow such ludicrous advice!
Yes defining a moral code is a hard problem, possibly one of the hardest to develop a complete framework. For a baseline though I go with "pain, not pleasant best not to cause it in myself and by similar token doing it to another better have a mightily good reason probably based on said same. Depriving someone of their resources causes pain or a slightly more abstract version of it, that is part 2. Both of these can be observed in nature as well if you want". From here we can probably jump to "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" as a more useful one. This gets me places far faster than reading a translated copy of a thousands of years old book.
If by "gets me places" you mean "makes me contradict myself wildly", sure. How's that "don't cause pain or deprive others of resources" thing working out for you when you argue for a genocide of little babies? Even if you were to argue "abortion only until pain can be felt", which is a very inconsistent line to mark the beginning of human life (the doctor gives you anaesthesia, you stop being a person), I'd at least call life a resource, a primary one.
Not really true. What happens to people who are born in some remote village in Africa who will never even hear of Jesus, let alone believe in him and follow his teachings? I know that's what missionaries are for, but if their words never make it to that village, who's fault is it really? What about extremist theocracies where the state mandated religion is the only way of life for everyone living there? What about babies who die? Or kids in general who die before they reach the mental capacity to follow a religion? The mentally handicapped? My ex-grilfriend's Baptist preacher said that babies automatically go to heaven because they haven't sinned, but the Bible says we are born sinners.
Um, the Bible also says God has delivered salvation upon us, freeing us from the consequences of our sins. I mean, fair mistake, you could've missed it, it's only
the very point of the Bible.
People who never heard of Jesus, be it Africans or little babies or whoever, go where we all go upon our Earthly deaths - in front of Him. Once again I repeat - He
knows. He knows the circumstances, the experiences, the motivations, the temptations, the opportunities, the character of us all. Thus I would worry more about the people who have heard of Christ - and reject Him without consideration or for dishonest reasons. Not gonna open this letter, might be news I dislike. Let's pretend it didn't arrive, got lost on the way.
The thing is, morality, like science, is always changing and evolving as we make new discoveries, or when new generations don't like how the last generation did things. There really is no absolute, as what is consodered moral can vary wildly from circumstance to circumstance. For instance, almost everyone agrees that killing someone else is bad, but you have to consider cases like self-defense, defending others, being in a war, or the death penalty. Many people can't agree on whether these are right or wrong, or even where you distinguish one from another
That's what I'm arguing - no, morality does not change. If morality was evolving and changing, it wouldn't be "like science". You'd have to argue that the world's rules are constantly changing and shifting, the physics now are different from the past physics and who knows whether we'll still have gravity in some hundred years. Our
understanding of the world changes, yes - by coming closer to or further away from a real, objective, static truth about the world. So do the moral principles we operate on the basis of can change by getting closer or further away from what Good really, objectively is.
As for some of your examples - morality of an act has long been divided into three elements (in some V century or so, by the Christian thinkers) of
action, motivation and circumstances. An action, like killing, can have its own moral definition - in this case, it's wrong. An action can be done for right or wrong reasons. For example, to save someone's life. That's virtuous. And finally, the circumstances can also influence whether or not an action was right or wrong - shooting somebody who's about to rape a woman is different than murdering the owner of the house you just broke into. And while we do and should try to consider all of these in our laws and personal lives, only God has the full insight into all three of these elements. We can't always agree on whether something is morally vile or morally virtuous or neither. We can't always know the motivations of the person, often even if that person is ourselves. And we don't fully know what circumstances are or what influence on the punishment/reward they should have.
Again, why am I arguing about all of this. There is no reason to argue the results and consequences of God's existence without discussing that very existence first. I keep trying to go back to "is God real?" and all I'm getting in return is "Christianity isn't good". Hey, newsflash - you don't believe in "good" or "evil", apparently, only in opinions about things. If morality is not objective, your own argument against the
good in Christianity (even forgetting that it's irrelevant to the "
reality of God" question in the first place) is obliterated. It's no argument, it's an "I don't like it!" childish tantrum.
Let's try to eliminate your hypocritical moral outrage against Christianity from the discussion using a hypothetical. Let's say a new religion shows up and it says "God exists, He's a personal being - and He hates people". Would you then believe that religion? Because none of your arguments thus far seem to contradict God's
existence, only His loving nature and/or His almighty nature and/or His three-personal nature. You're being heretics, but not atheists. Let's say a god exists, but is not like the Christian God outside of being personal. Why would you not believe in that one?
