Many Christians Lack Responsibility

Please write the major point of your reference. Bare links are discouraged and don't further the argument for you at all.

Well the main point is juste the title: Children are born believers in God academic claims

Heaven forbid!!!You do realize that Jesus himself hung around sinners ALL day long, right? And that he said it was the lost who need salvation? Has it ever occured to you that it may be you that is filthy or that your position is wrong? There is that distinct possibility. Have I been as clear as mud on my position?

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"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." Thomas Jefferson

The example of the bird was an analogy formed to point out a logical opinion, that if you predict something beyond chance, it is reasonable to assume you are getting a response to prayer.As for death, suffering etc.. I am going to assume that you do not understand the biblical explanation for why such things are prevailing in this world. And I will ask what I always ask. Why is it wrong for Jack the Ripper to rip in a universe with no innate meaning. Therefore, define "disgusting". Jack loves a juicy uterus on display, meanwhile I don't. what can we say? Not much!

Well we can say it is wrong, socially destructive and worthy of punishment.I fail to see what your point is?

My answer to destruction is; "so what". The universe doesn't care so why should I, logically it does not directly affect me and I feel that Jack has the right to gratify his flesh, because he is not responsible for the desires in his heart.Yes, that word "right" is a loaded term full of treachery from the bronze. Full of devious mikey-epithets.It's my big dig at societies silly moral relativisms and "rights".But I have a right to declare that a relative judgement of an absolute God must fall to pieces logically, and so does. Why?-If God is true, then He is Holy, and without blemish, no matter what you say from a relative place of convenience. (Heaven holds no liars, murderers, thieves..the system will no withstand one sin, this is why anyone to touch Mount Sinai would fry.)-If God isn't true, our morals mean nothing except in a weak relative way.Dawkins acknowledges it and his answer is that we can't help reality. LOL! Like reality somehow agrees with his atheism.He shall reap a strong mikey wind, the Lord shall sigh on him, and mikey-tornado will destroy. Hey but come on Straggler, don't straggle! Fact is that we have ALL inherited the sinful nature. That means you can only judge, if you yourself are perfect in all your ways, Holy, unblemished,etc....remind you of anyone yet? Can't you see the foolishness of it YET? That the error of judging God is so absurdly illogically silly as to be utterly futile. What will this do for us when on judgement day, God - by force (ad baculum), judges you according to HIS STANDARDS?What can anyone do practically? From hell, can we say; "I am god, I am right you are wrong! You established the universe, and gave breath to all life - whether it lives or dies, whom can give it grace, yet you Lord, are not my Lord, for I still choose to eat of the tree named after my god, which is me! I am my god, I know good, I know evil,. you know all things if you exist, yet I know the way...and what is my way? Raping, stealing, letting the poor die, spending my wages not on the poor but on things that never satsify, killing, lying, polluting your planet...yet I am right, because I burn forever....why do I burn forever? Because you cannot cleanse me, as I will never repent....your spirit will burn within me saying, "I created you", and I will say, no - I created me, and my evolution theory is my bible"bye for now.

Once we remove the extraneous waffle your argument boils down to the following:IF there is no God THEN morality becomes weak and meaningless.
You find this idea abhorrant. Therefore God must exist.Your assertion regarding morality in the absence of God is debatable. But whether your assertion is accurate or not your dislike of the assumed outcome is irrelevant with regard to the veracity of God's actual existence.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Why? What does whether one accepts the concept of deities have to do with moral issues. Moral put simply, Anything that one would not done to himself, his family, his friends or his possessions would constitute that which is immoral. Where does a deity come into this?

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969Since Evolution is only ~90% correct it should be thrown out and replaced by Creation which has even a lower % of correctness. W T Young, 2008

The bumper sticker quip "Let God and Let God" as I understand it has to do with learning not to be ruled by anxiety but trust in Jesus. I can be eaten alive by anxiety or I can trust Jesus to move and operate on my behalf. The latter is a better way to live, I have found. And that goes for moral areas as well.Now a word about this "operating" Jesus. This operation is often within the believer's being. As Paul told the Christians:"It is God Who operates in you both the willing and the working for His good pleasure."Receiving Christ is a matter of receiving a new life compounded into your original natural life. Now you the believe and Christ are mingled together in a harmonius blending. The believer is not use to this for he has learned to live only from his self. Now having received another divine and mystical Holy Spirit with in them, they must through patience and time learn to live in an "organic union" with Christ. Such a living obliterates anxiety.The Apostle writes again:"The Lord is near. In nothing be anxious, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thenksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses every [man's] understanding, will guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus." (Phil. 4:5b-7)The peace of God, which is a very inward peace radiating from the kernel of the Christian's being, will guard and garrison his thoughts against anxiety. A holy calm and the sense of one standing on a solid and reliable rock keeps one in peace as His life operates to move and direct your way.Some people coined the phrase "Let Go and Let God" probably because of this kind of experience. The victory of Christ over the Devil is sure. The Christian is to apply that victory in her life by joining her inner being to the Spirit of Christ. It is an appplicable victory like the use of a blank check on which we may write the amount of money that we need.We believers access the victory that Christ has obtained and allow it to flow firstly through our own being.Say I have a terrible problem with lust. I turn to Jesus and receive Him. I still have this lust problem. But I learn to declare:"Lord Jesus, your word says that I was crucified with you. Your word says that You have overcome the world. Your word says that I am more than a conquerer through Christ Jesus. Lord Jesus, I thank you for these thruths. I stand upon these truths. I don't believe my problems. I believe You and Your word. I don't believe my failures. I believe in You and Your victory. Praise you Lord Jesus my victorious Savior."This proclaming faith releases Grace into the inner being. And the praiser and thanker APPLIES the trememdous victory of Christ over the world, the flesh, and the Devil. This is "Not I But Christ" in action.The defeat of Satan by Jesus Christ then becomes an appicable reality that the Christian accesses through turning his whole being toward the living Lord Jesus.We have found that not only does the individual Christian benefit from this standing in faith. But an entre congregation may enter into spiritual victory by corporately and collectively making such a stand.This kind of standing will one day bring the Lord Jesus Christ physically back to the earth. While people are laughing and denigrating, as you spoke, the growing armies of Chrisians standing on the promises of God is encreasing to a critical mass under their noses.Don't expect to be informed by Mass Media hype on this.And we will bring the Lord Jesus back one day as He responds to enough of His saints believing not their circumstances, not their problems, not what they see but what the word of God says. Why don't you read more of the Bible.Did Abraham never question? What about Jacob? Do you think Joseph never questioned God while he was 18 years in prison. What about the patriarch Job? Did Moses never question? Did David never question? Did Jonah or Ezekiel never question? Did John the Baptist never question? Did Zacharius never question? Did Mary, Nathaniel, John, James, Phillip, or Peter never question?Why don't you embark on a little adventure and read through the Gospel of Matthew and John and see how many times you can locate the disciples of Jesus asking questions?Take some time each day and read for yourself apart from the laughter of the crowd. See how the followers of Jesus and of God questioned the One Whom they were following.Edited by jaywill, : No reason given.Edited by jaywill, : No reason given.Edited by jaywill, : No reason given.

...because they insist that morals must come from their deity.They absolve themselves of association of any guilt or crime due to their acting within the limits that their interpretive books tells them is okay - murder, mass murder, genocide, incest, stoning, blood sacrifice, beating, rape.I'd rather sit with the atheists, their morals don't depend on an invisible sky-daddy with a dodgy temper, and they have no angry face in the sky to kowtow to.They know that killing, rape, murder and theft (and so on) are wrong, because it harms somebody else. They know it's wrong because they have reasoned that it must be wrong.The religious person has no morals of his or her own - they are all imposed, and sometimes the deity demands that a believer do things no sane, rational person would do, and yet the believer will without question.many religious people say "hah, humanist morals - you can never get to an ought from an is!" but...if you say your god is the creator of the universe, therefore you ought to obey him, aren't you doing the same thing?

A very good point.Anyone who claims that an "absolute moral system from their all-powerful God trumps all others" is actually falling into the worst kind of relative moral system. That is, they are subjectively accepting the authority of the God simply because He is all-powerful. This choice of accepting the absolute moral system as one that should be followed is the identifying factor of a relative moral system. Ironically enough, this is as bad as mike the wiz's favourite example that atheists "may as well" follow Jack the Ripper's authority on morality.The only way such a choice is acceptable is if it can be shown that the absolute moral system is actually "good." In which case, one will have to define good apart from the absolute system... which then renders the absolute system irrelevent. With a stand-alone definition of "good," we're left with a moral system that is equivalent to any other relative system that uses it's own stand-alone definition of "good."Therefore, any claimed "absolute" moral system can only ever be as-"good"-as-or-worse than any claimed relative moral system.Hiding behind the veil of an "absolute" moral system is incredibly irresponsible and only shows where people have stopped thinking about why they accept such a moral system. It is the responsibility of all adults to understand how and why they make important decisions. Simply claiming that an absolute moral system is good just because "God says it is" is not being responsible, and simply isn't good enough.And, by the way, welcome to EvC. Have a good look around, it's big here and there are lots of interesting topics on a variety of subjects. Have fun!Edited by Stile, : Added welcome message, 'cause I think it's good to be nice

Hi,thanks for the welcome.I've not really read the bible ("oh, another one," you say, rolling your eyes, "ignorant of what the bible really means...") but I'm not really a hardcore militant atheist - I just have a head on my shoulders and do presume to put a hand up and say "but hang on...that sounds like magic, and I don't believe in fairy stories.".I'd be very, very happy if biblical literalists true believers would leave science and the scientific method and it's theories alone, so that those who wish to learn and further the real revealed truth of the universe (the theory of universal gravitation, the theory of evolution, thermodynamics, and so on) could get on with it, leaving the true believers to wallow in their ignorance without it's benefits until they recanted.

Bingo! And thank you for the lead-in. I had wanted to join in, but I was wanting to take a rather different approach than was being discussed at first. I haven't been back since then (your subtitle caught my eye), so I don't know whether my perspective has been given yet.Back before our first son was born, my wife was working on her elementary education degree and her credential. One of the requirements was a class in developmental psychology and she insisted that I take the class too. Basically, children's minds and thought processes go through a series of very characteristic stages of development; look up Jean Piaget for more information on the subject.Moral reasoning also progresses through development stages, of which, 30 years later, I only remember two. Young children are mired in rules-based morality, in which a powerful authority figure makes rules that everybody must follow; the all-important thing is to follow the rules, no matter what. As they mature, they develop moral reasoning, the ability to examine a situation and to reason out what should be done. A standard test for which stage a person is at is to present the situation of a person who steals medicine which he cannot obtain in any other way, in order to save the live of a family member who would die without that medicine. The person who says that man did wrong because he broke the rules is using rules-based morality, whereas the person who weighs in the factors and motivation is using moral reasoning.Rules-based morality has some interesting consequences. The rules are given to us by a powerful authority figure, like a parent or a teacher. Those rules appear arbitrary (and could just as well be arbitrary), but that is of no importance. The only important thing is that the rules be followed.Now, what about responsibility? What is our responsibility? To follow the rules. To whom are we responsible? Not to each other, but rather only to the authority figure. Now the zinger: what happens when our actions in following the rules causes harm to come to someone else? Who is responsible? Us? Oh, no! We were just following the rules as we are required to do. Well then who is responsible? Why, the rules-giver, of course. The one who makes the rules is responsible for what those rules cause, not the ones who follow those rules.Remember that infamous psychology study which the subjects were told was to study the effect of punishment on learning, whereas it was really testing how far a subject would go if ordered to by an authority figure. One of the experimenters posed as another subject who was chosen to be the learner. The learner was locked into a booth hooked up with electrodes. He would be given a memory task and if he made a mistake, then the "teacher" subject would administer an electric shock (the "teacher" was given a sample shock and it was substantial). The more mistakes the "learner" made, the more intense the shocks would become -- the markings of the switches became more and more ominous in appearance, increasingly suggestive of lethality. A scientist in a white lab coat taking notes on a clipboard oversaw the proceedings and would give the "teacher" instructions. Pretty soon, the "learner" would be panicking and begging for the experiment to stop, but the scientist would tell the "teacher" to continue and the "teacher" would comply. Then the "learner" started complaining about his weak heart and the "teacher" would continue as per the scientist's instructions. It would even get to the point when the "learner" became completely silent (ostensibly dead or dying) and the "teacher" would still continue as directed.Of course, the "teachers" were neither heartless nor sadistic. It was a gut-wrenching experience for them. A most interesting thing happened in the cases where the "teacher" continued to the most lethal shock levels. Everyone reached a point where they just could not continue ... until the scientist, the supreme authority figure, told the "teacher" that he accepted complete responsibility for what would happen. After that, the "teacher" subject was able to continue, many of them to the final most lethal switch.So then, of course "many Christians lack responsibility"! Because so many of them are still stuck in rules-based morality -- no small wonder, since their churches preach and strongly reinforce rules-based morality. They are not responsible for their actions nor for what their actions do to others; they are only responsible for following the rules. Nor do they have any responsibility to any fellow human, but only to their god.In contrast, atheists (and a number of theists too) employ moral reasoning -- they actually think about these things, unlike their rules-based neighbors. And they are responsible for their actions. And their responsibility is to everybody else.

yes, i remember. I saw it on the telly.Now, I don't believe everything I see on the telly (chriss angel can't fly, geller can't bend spoons with his mind, and so on) but...I'm inclined to believe this as there have been many independant research papers into exactly his effect.The scariest was a joint pair, where one person gave orders and the other carried them out - the result was that the person giving orders didn't feel any responsibility as he was just sitting there, and the person following the orders didn't feel any responsibility as he was just following orders...quite the evil circle./Greyseal

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1) If our own righteousness is "as filthy rags" and we are expected to "Let Go And Let God", does that imply that we are abdicating our personal responsibility by allowing God to fix things?

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"Let Go And Let God" is not Biblical. 'Work out your faith in fear and trembling' is, though. Christianity is always a partnership, a dynamic, 'interactive' one, and the Christian always has the option to opt out.There is no Christianity until and unless there is realisation and confession that all one's fancied goodness is false and really only self-interest.

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2) If we believe that Satan is alive and well on planet Earth, does that serve as a cop out? In other words, if we say that the world is in a mess due to Original Sin and figure that nothing will ever really improve until Jesus comes back, is that an abdication of our responsibility as members of the human race?

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'Original Sin' is the invention of a cult, another concept not found in the Bible. But it is true that all but Christ commit evil deeds, and need to accept the forgiveness of Christ. Knowing that they have a 'clean slate', they are given the confidence and gratitude to live lives of love for others for the sake of Christ.'How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!' Heb 9:14 NIV'We love because he first loved us.' 1 Jn 4:19 NIVNow if all were to do this (and it is mankind's duty to do so) it would be a very different world indeed. In fact, if just those who celebrate next 'Christmas' were to do as Christ requires from that time, the world would be unrecognisable in 2010. It is not a question of waiting until Jesus returns. Waiting is precisely what will earn his eternal wrath. The world is supposed to be a much better place than it is, and those who do not seek to make it so in Christ's way will regret their failure.