What would convince you?

[TheKeyAuthor]

1 Would he have to appear on Oprah or the like? Which means he has to be a celeb first. How would he become a celeb?
2 Would he have to do tricks like change water into wine? Which means the likes of David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy etc. are candidates?
3 Would you believe a "miracle" on TV anyway?
4 Are we too sceptical and information overloaded to believe anything any more?
5 Would anything possibly convince anyone in the 21st century anyhow?

Do explain, then, what you mean by loving the entire human race, all those strangers on the other side of the world whom you've never met.

Is that the same love you feel towards, say, your DC?

Basically - sins are sins, as any victim of crime knows.

Forgiveness doesn't stop something from being a sin, it makes the person who committed the sin forgiven.

God forgives because God loves.

And yes, there are 'sin lists' in the NT, normally in the context of something like 'You have been forgiven by God. You are free. Therefore, do not use your freedom to sin. Don't use your freedom to [sin list here]. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love' (that's the gist of Galatians, btw).

Does that make sense?

Really quickly, before I go -

Greek (in which the NT was written) has at least 4 words for love - poor old English only has 1. Agape is the love for all, and for God - philios (in various forms) is familial love.

It really doesn't make a lot of sense but sounds like a very contrived explanation to explain the unexplainable - how and why an omnipotent deity would make billions of people, expect certain behaviours of them, have heaven & hell waiting for them if they err, but not damn them (as that would scare people from religion, possibly?)

So which one is your love for 6.8 billion strangers?

What are you talking about?

Apologies Holo, I thought that the defining aspect of god's grace was that he bestows his forgiveness on us even though it is undeserved. My googling for "god's grace" and reading all the pages that stress that point very heavily has obviously lead me astray.

Clearly, as your example with your daughter shows, you don't ascribe to the view that god's forgiveness is undeserved. That's cool. Because, after all, if she genuinely apologises for her misdeeds then your forgiveness is deserved and appropriate, isn't it?

^do you believe that humanity descends to survival of the fittest? or,
do you believe that humanity ascends to survival of the fittest?^

I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what survival of the fittest actually means. It's not a normative ideal to be aspired to; being 'fit' is not the same as being 'good', and it's also not the same as being the last man standing in some sort of gladiatorial circus of life. It's simply a description of the criteria of natural selection in the evolution of species: if an organism is better equipped to survive in its environment than another, it is likely to live longer and therefore has a better chance to reproduce before dying.

Reading some kind of a moral meaning into natural selection is really missing the point of what the phrase actually describes.

Incidentally, there are good arguments in favour of altruism actually being an aspect of 'fitness' - so even if you happen to think that people are completely dominated by their biology (and FWIW that's not a unanimous atheist position) this still doesn't necessarily imply any kind of Social Darwinist dystopia.

if you believe that the story ends at one's death and that there is no Hereafter then the focus is more on enjoying oneself with the time one has left.

whereas the religious view is to store up as many good deeds as one can before death because all actions, good or bad, shall be accounted by God.

Frankly, I completely fail to see the inherent 'goodness' of acting in a certain way in order to rack up a few more points on some heavenly scoreboard. if that is why a person acts in a certain way I would say that their actions are inherently selfish, even if in the best case scenario you could say that the effects of their behaviour happen to be beneficial.

I also don't think you give humans quite enough credit: as a social species, we're capable of empathy and generally don't enjoy seeing others in pain or distress. IME even religious people usually act in an altruistic way because they feel compelled to - not in order to get an extra gold star on their record.

crescent in the case of the grandmother, I would hope that by showing compassion and nursing a senile grandmother, my daughter will learn that is how we act towards those we care for, and will care for me in my senile old years. The "they" I mentioned is the people I live with, both immediately and in the wider world. An example of this would be helping mums with pushchairs up stairs, because I know when I am out with a pushchair I appreciate the help. It is treating others as we wish to be treated and nothing to do with any Divine rules or guidance for behaviour.

Behaving socially responsibly seems to me to be more of an evolutionary/biological/sociological construct and survival necessity than simply because "God says so".

people who hold this view believe that their egos must be broken and tamed and that will allow them to reach unity with the Divine.

Do you mean "people within Islam who hold this view"? Surely if everything is of the Divine that includes our egos and our frailties?

I once had a conversation with a very thoughtful and spiritual person - he said that the Gnostics say that God cannot be All Loving, All Powerful and All Knowing at the same time, but only two of the three. The Gnostics also believe that this world was made by a God (the God of Abraham) who has become slightly mad and a demi-urge, who has forgotten his link with the true Divine, and that Sophia/Wisdom weeps for him. Somehow that story (and it is just a story as far as I'm concerned) makes more sense to me than believing that the God of Abraham is some sort of loving Father disguised as a vengeful punishing dictator.

crescent I'm not sure I am reading your words correctly, but are you seriously suggesting that the only reason children take care of their elderly parents is because the God of Abraham tells them too?

Compassion and love of family is not the preserve of the religious.

I don't want my children to look after me in my old age because either God tells them to, or because they are scared of the consequences if they don't!

Atheists make up their own moral position. As I mentioned earlier, I started from a basis of "Treat others as you would want to be treated" and worked my way up from there. Do you really need a book to tell you that, say, indiscriminate murder is a bad idea?

British culture is made up of any number of influences. Some of it is undoubtedly Christian in origin, just as a lot of Christian morality is based on Judaism, and Judaism is based on ancient Canaanite and Zoroastrian mythology and so on and so forth. What's your point?

crescent - I'd be careful with quoting Einstein in your position. Clearly you haven't read much of what he has actually written, otherwise you would know that he was an agnostic (said so in various letters) who had nothing to do with religion from the age of 12, and showed polite contempt for belief in an anthropomorphic God - that's yours, btw.

As AGun said further down, you have completely misunderstood "survival of the fittest" to mean death of weaker and older members of society.