Admitting You're a Sinner

[SteveII]

However, this moral life has no ultimate meaning without salvation.

Leo Tolstoy thought you were wrong about morality not being the core. To him, your statement above is backwards.

To him, leading a moral life was what led him to union with God. He was an extremely wealthy russian aristocrat, educated in science and philosophy. He felt the Church emphasized superstition over morality, and became an atheist. But he converted back to Christianity later on. Once he learned a bit of Greek and studied the Gospels carefully, he concluded that "Resist not evil" was the central commandment of Christ.

Not only was he a pacifist (ie took the commands in the Sermon on the Mount literally). He wrote, "A letter to a Hindu" describing how how the people of India might drive the British from their country without "doing evil" to them. It was picked up by [some schmuck] who actually used it to liberate the country. This is the real power of Christianity. The moral teaching has the power to change the world (and without doing a single bit of harm to anyone). The early Christians did it in Rome, and it worked. But once they became Rome, they abandoned pacifism. Today, whether speaking of Catholics or Protestants, True Christianity is no longer practiced. It's not a religion. It's the zombie of Rome. (That's a poetized version of Tolstoy's perspective BTW.)

Later in his life, Tolstoy came to the realization that he could not be both a wealthy aristocrat and a Christian at the same time. So he gave up all his wealth, renounced his title of count, and lived in a small cabin in the countryside where he supported himself by working the fields with the peasants. He actually did what the Bible commanded. He gave up his wealth-- and a ton of it, too. Be careful throwing around the term "cultural Christian." You just might be one of them.

But was he a Christian? He did not believe Christ was who he said he was in the NT. He worked up his own definition. I like to work with the original, generally accepted and clearly articulated one from the documents that founded Christianity. 

I would say that Christian are on average more moral than atheists...IF you remove all nominal and cultural Christians from the comparison.

LOL! You have no way of knowing this. How can you look into the hearts of millions of people and say that, on average, genuine Christians are more moral. I was expecting you to concede that there is no clear evidence of a correlation between faith and morality. No wonder people called you out on this.

Why would I concede that there is no difference in morality between a population of people who individually and collectively develop/discover subjective morality and another population that is commanded to follow a moral code as part of their worldview? Even non-christians agree that the moral code of Jesus is admirable. Seems like a very reasonable inference to me. 

Sorry that I have been arguing so voraciously when you are just trying to present the Christian perspective. It's just that I've recently brought it up in Christian forums (where I've adopted a curious, passive posture) and heard too many things about Jesus Blood™ and salvation. You may be catching the brunt of what I would like to say to them.

No problem. By AF standards, it did not even register.