Heaven seems awful 2 me-"Theist laughs at loudly & with great cruelty"

[Neo-Scholastic]

I appreciate you taking the time to answer him [GC]…

And I’m glad you noticed. When I feel it is appropriate I will also take issue with the posts of believers.

…you're both giving too little credence to the concept of "True Christian", with the whole "changed hearts" thing. While I understand that the changed heart is the point of Christian doctrine, you must understand that a HUGE percentage of the roughly 3/4ths of the USA who are Christians are "pew-warmers",…

The church doors are open to all, even atheists and unrepentant sinners. The observation that many church-goers are either unrepentant or in various states of regeneration is obvious but trivial.

So not only are you insulting us with the whole "Well TRUE Christians™ can't do this, so it must be the atheists" type of thinking, you're disobeying Jesus by focusing on the mote in our eye while ignoring the plank in your own.

Unfortunately far too many believers talk in church-speak. TRUE can mean either acceptance of sound doctrine or it could mean conformance to what is right and proper conduct for a Christian. When a believer says that someone is not a “true” Christian it could mean one of three things: 1) unorthodox doctrines, like Mormonism or 2) unrepentant cultural Christians that go through the motions without actually accepting doctrine or 3) the unregenerate Christians whose will to obey doctrine hasn’t yet caught-up with their conviction that Christian doctrine is true.

In the case of category 1, they are not true Christians because their deviance from orthodoxy leads them to hold to the standards of behavior that are not right and proper, like legalism. Category 2, are tacit unbelievers even though they may accidentally conform to Christian standards of right living, they disobey when it suits them. In reality all the rest of us Christians are in Category 3. Part of being a Christian is knowing that we are sinners and no one can conform to the perfect example of our Lord and Savior.

When you complicate it by saying "they [atheists] have no moral basis for not doing this", you're moving from blindness to bigotry.

All that means is that if there are no moral absolutes, as some atheists say, then any semblance of moral behavior is merely accidental, like the unrepentant Christians in Category 2. It doesn’t necessarily mean that in the eyes of Christians atheists are any more sinful than anyone else.