Theists: Hitchens Wager

[Neo-Scholastic]

Any action motivated by love for the Lord.

How is an act motivated by love for the Lord different from one that is objectively moral and motivated by a love for the truth?

Not much difference. A love for the truth already acknowledges a transcendent source of value. From there is it only a hop, skip, and a jump to acknowledging God as the foundation for that transcendent Truth.

But then, Christianity is a religion based on the notion that having certain thoughts are a crime, which pretty much undermines their moral claims overall.

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This is getting repetitive. Motivation is not an action.

Thoughts and intentions are absolutely necessary in the calculus of determining the morality of action. Steam engines lack any intention in-themselves and do what they do without moral import. They are not moral agents. Similarly, tigers are not acting immorally by eating monkeys because it is a tiger’s instinctual nature to hunt, kill, and eat other creatures. Moral responsibility depends on the agent’s capacity to weight consequences and choose between actions that may or may not conform to that agents’ nature. The cultivation of virtue, in both thought and deed, means forming mental habits of courage and caring rather than indifference and cowardice, learning the physical skills required to act on them, and building up the resources needed to do so.