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

[TheRocketSurgeon]

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.

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.

Respectfully, I must disagree with you that it is "obvious but trivial", at least from the perspective of a member of a loose group who are often accused of immorality and worse, with the "what is your basis"-derived arguments... particularly in this case, where we're talking about something so awful as sex slavery.

Though I don't think they fit quite as neatly into categories as you suggest, I concur with your assessment about the various types of Christian, especially the "by habit" Christians, who are just going to church, praying, etc, out of family and social tradition, but who walk out of the church and fail to apply any of the beliefs of the church to their everyday lives. Practically ever sermon that has ever been spoken covers that issue, at some point! So for him to say that "it cannot be Christians" raised my ire, since it is both prejudiced and dishonest, and doesn't withstand even the most cursory examination.

Certainly I agree with GC and with you that such practices are not in keeping with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, nor should they be something someone who claims to follow his teachings is capable of doing, whether Jesus is divine or not. But that's a huge step away from what GC said, above.

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.

Not quite what it means. We've tried to explain to you that moral behavior is a social species issue, that it is seen in social animals as well, and that only humans have tried to assert that their particular belief-set from their particular tribe is actually the Ultimate Morality™. What you're really doing is using a divine authorship claim to bolster the social moral structure put together by the ancient Israelites, as modified by Paul (et al) when those beliefs were shaped by Greco-Roman influence. You're saying that a book (any book!) contains a Direct From God List of Morals, and we're saying that is hardly a surprising claim for authors in that day and age, but we know a lot more about how the human brain and societies work, now, and should probably base our moral reasoning on what we've learned-- one of the things we've learned is that slavery is bad, you shouldn't own other people, m'kay?-- instead of what the ancients thought. But that takes a lot of thinking about things, and some people prefer the pre-digested version, claiming to have been given The One True Morality™ from God Almighty™ directly through His Prophets.

For those of us who take a more nuanced approach to the idea of moral and ethical reasoning, such an argument borders on the ridiculous... but it is insulting to those of us who do bother to think about this, to develop that sort of nuanced approach to the complex subject of human morality, and to hold to those values in our lives as best we can, only to be told that we're immoral for failing to follow Tribe #12785's particular rule-set (which we find immoral in many ways). I appreciate that you're willing to recognize that, statistically, we are much less likely to commit crimes (prison population study) and that our children being raised godless actually show a higher rate of empathy and decency toward other children, when you say it "doesn't necessarily mean" we are more sinful.

But the fact is that most Christians don't see us as anything but minions of Satan, or amoral agents of selfishness and evil. That is what GC was implying, there... clearly, to him, because of the magical transformation of Christianity, only "nonbelievers" could possibly do such an awful thing. That's how he thinks of us. That's why we thank him for showing us of what horrible bigotry Christianity is too often comprised, so we can warn others by his example to give up religious-magical thinking and learn to form a moral system based on reason.