(October 4, 2009 at 4:29 am)Arcanus Wrote:(October 2, 2009 at 11:56 am)Eilonnwy Wrote: By the moral criteria you assert, with the exception of belief.
Yet the person is NOT "relatively good" by Christian moral criteria. Just because the life of Joe Atheist seemed to correspond to a brief selection of God's commands, the relationship between his conduct and God's commands was coincidental, not intentional (viz. his convictions and motivations had nothing to do with God). Under the Christian worldview, morality is grounded in the nature of God and expressed prescriptively in his commands; that means no act is moral or immoral in and of itself, but rather in how it relates to the nature and will of God. So getting married, having children, giving to charity, etc., such things are not in themselves good, but rather only when they are informed and influenced by the nature and will of God. Predicating morality on humanity is consistent with a Humanist model but not with a Christian model, which posits God, not man, as the final reference point of all predication.
But even IF some things in his life corresponds to Christian moral precepts, he cannot be considered relatively good if MOST things he does violates them; i.e., if his life is consistent with 12 commands yet violates 240 other commands, then by definition he is relatively bad (95%), not relatively good, a position that is not helped by passages such as James 4:17.
This is an absolutely disgraceful doctrine, and legacy of the assumed superiority of the Christian worldview. The view that you and I could both take exactly the same compassionate action (e.g. giving money or time to a charitable cause); however somehow your action is intrinsically more moral than mine, as you do it via a relationship with god, and I do it out of pure compassion for my fellow man. I find this abhorrent, and a legacy of Christianity trying to assert itself as the dominant religious worldview.
I know you're a very skilled debater, and you'll undoubedly have some christian rationale to back up your belief. However if you can't see that this dogma is obviously invented with the sole aim of making Christianity "the only game in town", then you've clearly closed your mind to seeing any possible flaws or doubt in your own worldview.
