Four questions for Christians

[Consilius]

To say God should make us incapable of lust is to say that he should make us incapable of sin in other regards.

He hates sin so much, it would solve all his problems.

But, what you say doesn't follow. God didn't give us wings to fly, so he shouldn't have given us feet to walk?

The reason why we have the ability to sin is so that we can love God through our own merit.

And yet, it isn't really love because it's purchased with promises of eternal life, punishments of eternal death, and a situation where one party's will matters and the others' is not only of no importance, but should be ignored at all costs to satisfy the control freak. Under the Christian salvation, there is no incentive to avoid evil in and of itself. You do it because you want to be saved. You want to receive the promised rewards and avoid the promised punishments, over and above all else, and why wouldn't you? The very idea of salvation makes loving God selflessly an impossible task, yet that is precisely the demand made of you as a Christian. It makes me wonder where the morality is in all this. Seems like pure pragmatism to me. Or, perhaps, it is a poorly-conceived idea which betrays the unimaginative human agency responsible for inventing it. Why didn't Calvinism catch on? Because who is going to 'love' a God who is almost certainly going to condemn you no matter what? Would you?

So the Christians of history did all they did in the name of an afterlife for themselves? Isn't doing good it's own reward? Kindness and virtue bring people closer to God on earth, and therefore closer to heaven, because all heaven is God's prescence. Heaven isn't for people who do good stuff for credit, it's for people who are good at heart, so they can live with the ultimate good that good hearts desire. This is why Christ preached against lust. It's not enough to simply not do adultery; your desire to commit this offense against another man's marriage shows who you really are as a person.

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To say God should make us incapable of lust is to say that he should make us incapable of sin in other regards.
The reason why we have the ability to sin is so that we can love God through our own merit. So that people can be good because they choose not to be evil and actively work against it, not because they have no other option.

You do realize that you have painted god as a veritable psychopath. He is one who could take away our pain, with a snap of his proverbial invisible fingers wipe away all sin, but instead he would rather watch us suffer for his own entertainment, to watch us strive for an impossible goal that he knows we cannot attain because we are simply human.

To believe that such a being is in any way good is the epitome of a delusion that will merely make the believer suffer rather than to be free of such horror.

Did I say that God gets a kick out of sin and suffering? Yet it exists in an imperfect world filled with imperfect beings.
None of us will ever be perfect, but do our failures make us better or worse? The fight to find God in a world of imperfection is noble in itself, and God calls people from the imperfect world to find perfection in him. It's a choice to love him or hate him, and one that anybody can make.

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The murder of another human being is always wrong and will forever be. It doesn't matter if it will help us in a million years. We don't need it to be written down. Everyone around the world knows this. It appears this particular ethic is not only eternal, but invisible and universal.

Did I not bring up the ancient chinese's punishment where they kill all the relatives of the offender? Even children? Evidence shows that it isn't always wrong to people, people used to do these things thinking they're right. If you want to dispute this please bring up evidence.

Right now, you don't need it written down. Because that's what we are now, we are the product of the evolution of human morality. If we didn't need it written down, why is it such a big thing that your god included it in the ten commandments? Because back then people DO need it written down. So when the people who came up with your religion attempted to make laws to govern people, not killing was one of the big ones.

Even now there are minority of people who kill people and they don't think it's wrong. Clearly not everyone in the world knows this. For these people, it's because of the law that they refrain from acts like this. Sometimes they don't and they end up in the newspaper.

Is it more likely that we invented a world where homicide isn't a good thing, or that we discovered that living in peace was the best way to live?

Both. What's the difference? By doing the second we invented the first.

So you ascribe our morality to a prehistoric group of people?

What's wrong with prehistoric people? They came before us. Just like i'm ok with saying mathematics was invented by an ancient group of people, i'm ok with saying our morality came from our ancestors, who learned the hard way. Our morality and laws are still evolving even to this day. A very good example is the gay rights movement. Just few decades ago people think being homosexual is morally wrong. But now it's legal for gays to marry just like normal people. We are inventing a world where being gay is ok by changing the laws. And people's morality tend to lag behind a bit. Now there are still people walking around thinking gays are an abomination. But 100 years from now they will be the extreme minority. Because as a whole, our morality would have adapted.

To me it's so obviously absurd to say being gay is immoral. But it's not so obvious for a lot of people. It used to be that way for killing innocent people.

I was referring to the crime of murder in my example. Capital punishment is not done without it being required by law, no matter how terrible. Maybe the ancient Chinese had stronger family ties.

The Israelites already knew that murder was wrong, but it needed to be reinforced in the Torah because people bend the laws and the Ten Commandment served as a check-and-balance. The Jews later formed a dependency on this law in the aftermath of Adam's sin but God foretold that they wouldn't need it spelled out for them, because God's law would be "written on their hearts" in the New Testament (Jeremiah 31:33).

Those who think that killing is OK are either psychopathic or have been indoctrinated to believe it is. You can't get that way on your own.

OK, there is legislation in all countries against most forms of homicide, but that killing another human being has ever been, is, or will be inherently good is impossible, no matter how legal it becomes. It is in times like that that written moral codes come in handy. Inflicting pain on another person is simply wrong by its own merit, and we can't make it good.

It still remains that morality couldn't have just been dreamed up by a group of people overnight who made the world follow their rules. They learned it, they didn't invent it. If we knew the dead were reincarnated, murder would be a form of public service.

Why do we think that it's OK to be gay? Because we accept the scientific study that gays are simply a demographic, not a cultural sect. Those who do not know or accept this say that being gay is wrong, like the Bible authors, who have indoctrinated those against homosexuality. Our belief that all men are equal overrules the differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals. That's why we didn't need to be told that gays should be accepted as equal members of society.