genuine question from atheist - view on Christanity and personal responsibility

[kentishgirl]

Hi - promise this isn't just Christian-baiting.

I've come to the conclusion that Christianity is a substitute for having a personal conscience or taking personal responsibility. Being a Christian is like having a 'get out of jail free card' in that you are taught God will forgive you anything. So you can do anything, as bad as you like, go and pray for forgiveness and move on, slate wiped clean, feeling great about yourself. So it doesn't matter if you do wrong. As an atheist, if I do something wrong, it's always with me, it's always on my conscience, so that makes me always try to do the right thing.
I didn't always think this way. It's the only way I can make any sense of something that happened to me at the hands of a couple of serious, committed Christians. One of them even works full time for a church. They did something terrible to me but have shown no remorse, no guilt, and made no attempt to make things right with me. I'm positive they prayed for guidance at the time and then forgiveness afterwards, and now all's good in their world, while I'm still dealing with the fall-out.
Am I really wrong in interpreting Christianity in this way? Isn't it true that it enables horrible behaviour by teaching you that if you do wrong, all you've got to do is pray for forgiveness afterwards, and you are ok, never mind the effect of what you did? Basically if God is your only judge, and forgiveness is guaranteed, it gives you permission to act like a right bastard as long as you say sorry to God afterwards? there's no personal responsibility for what you have done.

Cap I think you have to recognise that your post did give that impression.

If you didn't mean it, and it was thoughtless drafting, the right thing to do is to apologise nicely and clarify your meaning. Not to fight to the death saying that you didn't do anything wrong and we are all projecting things into your post.

I hope you can see the irony here.....

Ok, I'm sorry my drafting gave that impression. I hope I can write things more clearly next time.

Admittedly I can be a bit warrior like sometimes. I have had a lot of practice having to defend people I love.

I take the point from some Christians that repentance is not supposed to be a 'get out of jail' card, but it's also been said that Christianity varies. No one group has the copyright to enable them to say "no, only this is Christian".

Bearing that in mind and taking into account my own experiences and discussions with Christians I have to say that it is a real Christian belief. In my opinion a very damaging one. For the person believing it and those around them.

That's one of the big problems that I have with religion BigDorrit, is that the 'good' people, by demanding deference to their religious beliefs, make it easier for those who hid behind religion whilst doing 'bad' thinks to demand deference for their beliefs and actions also.

It's like men telling sexist jokes - the 'good' men who behave respectfully towards women but yet still tell sexist jokes, make it easier for the men who tell such jokes and do so with misogynistic intent to get away with it. You might say that this is not a good analogy as sexist jokes are not comparable to the Bible, but the comparison is with humour and the bible. If there were no actual misogyny, it wouldn't matter if someone told a sexist joke because there would be no harm behind it.

BigDorrit yes I'm sure they would have been good anyway. Religion just gets the credit. A bad person threatened by hell and/or offered heaven might behave differently, but that's not the same as a good person anyway.

And yes Thistledew, that is something that bothers me too.

I've had debates on here with some very nice Christians. One of the things I have said (As gently as I could) is that they provide cover for the bad ones. Even if they are not evangelists, just by being themselves they make their religion attractive and they are effectively vouching for it to the people around them.

If we could actually know for sure we might find that some of those attracted fell victim to the bad ones or even joined their ranks.

I would say that there are some people who use christianity as some sort of cover.

Backonlybriefly I think you are trying to have your cake and eat it. On the one hand, you say that your conversations with Christians have proved to you that they think that repentance is a get out of jail free card. On the other hand, you accuse Christians who don't think that of providing cover for those who do. We have seen before that you say that Christians cherry pick the Bible and aren't prepared to deal with the difficult bits -- yet when I said that I would like to discuss those difficult bits with you, you refused to do so.

You want on the one hand to portray all Christians as illiberal fundamentalists, and on the other hand you're not prepared to engage wi Christians who challenge that. That makes me feel quite cross, because it's a dishonest attitude masquerading as principle.

i did think that that was a little bit harsh niminy.

I can sort of see what Back means.

If she comes at it from an angle of, as she may see it, a lot of stuff is dont by so called religious people around the world, that is not good, then the genuine christians are supporting a corrupt church iyswim.

Yes, niminy, I've always acknowledged, and even insisted that there are many kinds of Christianity and of Christians. You may recall that I have said before that it would be actually be easier to talk about if each had a different name. I bet that rings a bell.

When someone describes something that Christians have done a poster with different beliefs will often say 'that is not my belief'.

Yes, we know that, but it is theirs and theirs is as much Christianity as anyone else's.

You may have heard Christians speak of how many Christians there are in the world. This is often used to lend credibility to the rightness of Christianity. Yet we see that there are nearly as many different forms as there are Christians.

niminy, your own post there is a bit muddled. You said "You want on the one hand to portray all Christians as illiberal fundamentalists" yet you admit in the same breath that I have said Christians are not all like that and also that I have spoken of cherry picking to support a different version. Which is it? I don't think you can reasonably complain that I lump you all together and also complain that I suggest you are different.

As for the cherry picking that is implicit in the varieties of Christians. If you all took it literally and followed every word then you'd have the same beliefs.

As for me refusing to discuss those difficult bits with you I can't recall the context. Were you perhaps trying to change the subject?

I have in fact tried to discuss those 'difficult' bits many times and usually I'm told (possibly by you too, but I won't swear to it) that 'those bits don't count'. I'm usually told for example that any part of the bible that shows god as kind are accurate whereas any that show him to be a sadistic brute are metaphor or mistranslation. Debate in that case quickly turns to farce.

link here, your post at 10.22. I wonder that you don't remember it.

What you are saying in your post of 18.30 is that 'nice Christians' act as a front for the Fred Phelps-style fundamentalists, and that the witness 'nice Christians' bear to our faith is a kind of grooming for the real Christian activities of the bad guys.

My kind of Christianity is just as real as Fred Phelps's, and I absolutely reject the slur that I provide a cover, or that I vouch for, or groom people for that version of Christianity. I do not.

So,BigDorrit, the Torah/Pentateuch was compiled during the Babylonian exile from materials brought from Jerusalem by the exiled Jews, some of which originated in the southern kingdom of Judah, and some in the Northern kingdom of Israel (the division occurred after the death of Solomon in 931BC). So Genesis was compiled in the sixth century, which makes it one of the latest parts of the Hebrew Bible to be written. The scribes who compiled the Pentateuch combined writings that referred to God as JHWH (from Judah) and those that referred to God as Elohim (from Israel), with other materials that had their origin in priestly writings from the Temple. These three main sources are known as J (Jahwistic) E (Elohistic) and P (Priestly).

Genesis 1-2 combine the J and E sources -- 1.1-2.3 is generally agreed to be of later origin and is Elohistic, 2.4 onwards is earlier and is Jahwistic. These two accounts of creation are clearly very different and in some respects contradictory. We need to consider what the scribes who compiled the book of Genesis thought they were doing when they put these two together. They were exiles who had been forced to leave their country and march hundreds of Miles to a foreign land; they had seen the temple, the centre of Israel/Judah's sense of its history and nationhood, the place where they believed God dwelt on earth, destroyed. They saw themselves as the remnants of a shattered nation. What they were doing was piecing together the fragments of their culture that they had been able to bring with them, to assemble out of it an account of who they were, and of how they had ended up where they were.

The Pentateuch as a whole is the founding story of Israel, and it moves from the creation of the the world through primordial man to the family stories that tell of the birth of the nation of Israel. The creation stories, then, are not supposed to be understood as quasi-scientific accounts of how the earth was made, but stories that tell us about the nature of the God that made everything. It doesn't matter that the stories are inconsistent because they are telling us different, complementary things about the nature of God. The questions underlying these chapters are not 'what happened and in what order' but 'why did God do these things, and what does it mean for humans' relationship with him'.

my post at 10.22 six weeks ago, but nice try implying that I was pretending not to remember something I said this morning.

and I see that I was right about why we didn't get into it too.

Because you said. "I'm happy to have a talk about some of the hard bits in the Bible, because I'm committed to grappling with the Bible as a whole. And I'm committed to using the best scholarly tools available for doing so.

and I said "You mean we say "look it's all about brutal murder and abuse. It tells you that psychotic behaviour is normal and expected" and you say 'well according to this learned paper all those bits are metaphorical but it goes back to being literal for verse 12 and 13 and then 14 onwards is metaphorical'

Which is what you do, niminy. Hence your comment about "using the best scholarly tools available" instead of just reading what it actually says.

Now as for your whole point about me accusing 'nice' Christians of grooming I could take that two ways. Either you are so poor at reading you actually thought I said 'intentionally' or you are so dishonest that you thought you could get away with saying it and no one would notice.

I don't think you are stupid, Niminy, so it has to be the latter.

You realise that every time you do that Jesus cries in disappointment.

There is back history here so I am staying out of it.

So you will only talk about the Bible on your terms, is that it? Only in the most ignorant, literal-minded way? You aren't willing to take into account any of the scholarly study that has been done on it, but only to read it as literally as possible? That's a shame, because it means that you are appearing dogmatic and closed-minded. What would you lose by having a discussion with me about the Bible?

I beg your pardon if you did not mean that liberal Christians provide cover for fundamentalists even if they vigorously and openly disagree with them. But that is what you said even if, rather patronisingly, you put it 'gently'. I accept that you did not say that that amounts to grooming, although I still don't think it is a million miles away from what you did say, which was that people who are attracted by liberal Christianity might well fall into the clutches of the 'bad guys' as if liberal Christianity is the gateway drug for the Class A stuff.

Why not? I don't know anyone who doesn't talk about the bible other than on their own terms. When was the last time you discussed a significantly different interpretation other than to defend your own view? Yet you accuse non believers who question and analyse what you say is the 'truth' as being narrow minded, usually just for pointing out that the explanation they have been given is contradictory or tortuous.

What I am always fascinated to ask is:
Given that there are so many divergent ways of interpreting the Bible, What aspects of your belief do you think you could be wrong about?
Are there any parts of the bible with which you disagree? Where you think it should properly be interpreted in a certain way but you don't actually agree that it displays a moral viewpoint?

Since nobody asked, this is my take on the subject (not the boring and pedantic terribly fascinating argument about who said what and what it all means, the actual OPs actual question...) as a follower of a Heathenish non-Abrahimic religion:

kentishgirl it is not your job to absolve anybody of responsibility for their actions. And it is not your job to make sense of what they did.
We are not responsible either for the guilt or for the innocence of others.

Your first job is to make sure that they are not continuing to hurt you in any way - including trying to make you feel guilty for being hurt in the first place. It's surprising how often this step gets skipped. If that takes going no-contact with them and/or those who defend them, or even reporting them to interested parties, then that's what it takes. Justice, as mentioned by somebody else, is not the same as vengeance - vengeance is when you make somebody suffer for the sake of seeing them suffer. I can't always bring myself to argue against vengeance to be honest. Although I do try. Justice is forcing them, through the law or other means, to face the consequences of their actions.

I do believe that some form of forgiveness is important, not for the other person involved but for our own health - anger causes heart attacks and other bad things. This might look like finally, after years, realizing that they did their best and it was still worse than completely fucking useless.
It is not something that you ever have to share with the other person, if you don't feel the need to. That's not your job. They might not have earned the right to know.
Furthermore, it absolutely does not mean that what they did was not wrong. If it wasn't wrong, you'd have nothing to forgive.
You do not have to be sorry for being angry for however long you're angry. If they hurt you, then you have the right to be angry.

I would say that they're the ones who will have to explain themselves to whatever god or gods they eventually come face-to-face with, and it's my understanding that most deities don't take excuses terribly well, but as an atheist you're unlikely to take any comfort in that. Maybe you'd like to see a wee bit of karma come their way instead - people who habitually hurt others seem to be their own worst enemy in the end.

"it's my understanding that most deities don't take excuses terribly well, but as an atheist you're unlikely to take any comfort in that."

They might not take excuses very well but they are quite happy to sit back and watch individuals spend decades visiting unspeakable acts of violence on the defenceless. That makes them a bit sick in my book. As an atheist our only hope is us. We cant trust a god to protect or punish. We need to find ways, be it education etc, of preventing crime and supporting victims.

head ever thought about relabelling yourself as anti-theist?

Because the a, to me, just means without, which would suggest more of an ambivalent attitude. That is, not recognising the power of belief in deity.

Following on from this idea, as I see it actions would be the only things that mattered and those would be considered on their own merit or lack of merit.

Which leads neatly onto preventing crime...how can you with any surety predict the causes of crime?

Unless you are a humanist? Revere humanity? Can humankind replace deity?