a lot of the misunderstandings about Christianity come from a lack of wisdom about human nature

I'd like to believe that ethics are more than purely transactional.

I don't give much credit to your concern about survival behavior.

Your technology answer hits me as incredibly weak. Slavery didn't end because of technology. White supremacy isn't going to subside due to technology. The tax cheats who have stolen TRILLIONS from America are being allowed to continue that theft for reasons that have nothing to do with technology. The end of the death penalty isn't arriving due to the advent of technology.

In fact, the advent of currency related technology has come about in part in order to facilitate crime. Terrorists, child pornographers, tax cheats, drug lords, and all the rest get to safely conduct business by creating and using that new technology.

 

Paul - a man who never met Jesus and never heard him preach.

 

The concept of sin is an entirely religious one and your statement presume the existence of God. Human beings are certainly imperfect in all sorts of ways but that's just because we're just intelligent animals. You don't need any religious concepts to explain it.

I'd question the idea of a need for a saviour and the purpose of this saviour. As per Christianity, God doesn't prevent the sin or any of the terrible consequences of it, he just forgives anyone who repents after they die (and therefore couldn't sin any more anyway).

And, of course, you have the underlying issue that Christianity presents God as the all-knowing and all-powerful creator of all of this. On that basis, he must have knowingly created this status (if only indirectly) and must have wanted everything to be exactly as it is, sin and evil included.

 

Does not the Bible say a woman should marry her rapist?

 

I'm not so sure being critical of religion helps this discussion.

Surely religion was created as a structure for making and enforcing decisions in this realm of ethics and morality.

We have to go beyond the notion that any religion has the answers we actually might need, but having the ancients work on this in the context of an absolute they postulated seems reasonably logical to me.

Physics, medicine, math, and other fields have also made advances based on postulates that are clearly worthless today. But, it was good that those folks made the progress they did.

 

Before they die. Not after.

 

Slavery in the US certainly ended because of technology. An industrial North with manufacturing technology, communications technology, and transportation technology invaded a low tech South and imposed an end to slavery.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-technology-shaped-the-civil-war-classics/

 

Nope. ethics has been evolving in a positive way over time. Up until '93 it was legal to rape your wife in some states. Usually the majority of people needs to feel an act is unethical before it becomes illegal. How many centuries did it take to agree that owning humans was unethical?
Survival mode has nothing really to do with it. That is outside the evolutionary process. That is emergent behavior outside acts of daily living.

 

Most basic morals have been the same for thousands of years. Don’t murder, don’t cheat, don’t lie, don’t steal.

 

yep, before the authors of the bible ever even existed

 

Because the Bible’s purpose is not to be a moral treatise. That’s a secondary point.

 

the bible is like other religious books, it gave religious leaders power

it was a way of governing people

 

Simple fact, you don’t have to teach your kids to be bad.

 

Well, in theory. It may depend who you are, who they are and the ethics at the time. At one time you could kill your slave and treat an indigenous people anyway you like.

Yes, that's simple.

 

That article points to communication improvements that allowed individuals to lobby far larger audiences through print media. That covered all topics, obviously.

Claiming communication improvements as the reason for the end of slavery is pretty lame.

 

No, it actually doesn't really. That's due to a misunderstanding and misinterpretation. The man has to marry her, she does not have to marry the man.

explanation near bottom of page here
http://www.politicalforum.com/index...nothing-and-life-is-not-a-fight.591570/page-2

 

I don't think so, or at least that definitely was not the intention of this thread.

"Sin" was meant to be defined as things that we (at least theoretically) could all define as evil. I did not mean it in the abstract or relative sense.

(I mean we could theoretically come to an agreement on what constitutes "evil" through logic, without any divine or supernatural reference)

 

I'm not criticising religion per se, only the specific idea in the OP around the nature of sin and the proposed need for some kind of saviour.

I meant the forgiveness (and reward for it) is said to only happens after death. Nobody actually gets saved from the immediate consequences of sin (their own or other peoples).

 

If you were seeking to clarify misunderstandings about Christianity though, wouldn't you have to present these concepts as they're presented in Christianity? If you have to shift the concepts, especially to the extent of not having any divine context, you're effectively contradicting your own point.

(I do now realise you started this thread three years ago though. I've never understood why (or how) people find such old threads and reanimate them )

 

I am not sure why so many Christians disagree on what it means to be Christian.... I vote for the good Christian got it right and the religious fanatics got it wrong

 

I was trying to equivocate two concepts, in a way that would help atheists understand a core piece of the religion.

The point was, the Christian concept of sin is (fundamentally) not entirely different from something that atheists can understand and agree with.

We might not always agree on what specifically constitutes sin, but we can have a general agreement, and maybe we could theoretically agree more what those things are through logical (secular) debate.

 

how about we all agree on free-will and pro-choice

 

Let me try to explain this to you. In the religious belief, evil ultimately will be punished, unless you repent.
This idea that everyone can do whatever they want doesn't even make logical sense. You know that.
People like you are also being inconsistent because the type of government you support would do the type of things that you say a good God should not do.
But let's set that to the side for a moment.
At the very least, you would have to support a Libertarian version of free will, where you can do whatever you want so long as it does not infringe on the rights of others. Would you agree with that? Can we see that as a starting point?
You shouldn't get a free pass to cause evil to others, agreed?

 

agree, freewill doesn't mean you can take others things, ect....

 

The ability to understand religious concepts has nothing to do with theism or atheism. Plenty of atheists are perfectly capable of understanding them and plenty of theists clearly don't understand religious concepts underlying their own faiths or others. Understanding a religion and practicing it are two entirely different things.

The fundamental problem with your point is that you don't have two concepts until you introduce the religious aspects to one of them. As I said, it is a simple fact that humans are flawed inconsistent and error-prone, largely down to basic biology. It is perfectly legitimate to dig further in to that and all of the various consequences of that, this being a core aspects to all sorts of socio-political, psychological and legal study.

The moment you start talking about sin and the "need for a saviour", you're shifting away from secular discussion or evidenced study. That isn't a parallel concept, it is an addition to or twist on it. You can study that too, but only as theology.