Unconventional Religion

[genkaus]

An objective moral standard doesn't mean that "my God told us what to do when he wrote it on a mountain." Many morals have evolutionary bases. We cannot survive as a species unless we follow them. They are as much a part of us as the laws of physics.

Excellent. So the next time I see a suspicious stranger on my street, I should feel free to attack him or if I see a particularly curvacious chick, I should feel free to jump her - since those morals have an evolutionary basis.

I prefer to call it 'tearing it down with regards to the unity of the Bible'.

Justify it in whatever way you want - we both know that you are just rationalizing your rationalization.

If you treat wealth as your 'treasure' (the kind of treasure in the bolded phrase, of which you can only have one, your primary treasure), your heart is in the wrong place. Morals first, money second.

An example of the corrupt morality taught by your bible. The lesson here is obvious - give up money for morals.

Money is good. It should not be admired in itself. There is no inherent virtue in material possessions or in having them.

Your 'interpretation'. What it says actually is "Money is evil and therefore, so is the love for it".

This is a description of an early church community that shared its possessions equally, physically and mentally, striking a balance between the poor and the rich, who were not better people than the poor were.

Yes - an example of the immoral principles of your religion in practice. Tell me, if you consider the early church to be "truly" Christian, why don't you share your possessions with the poor "equally"?

I underlined your misquotation.
The rich young man thought he could earn heaven by doing stuff. “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He forgot that salvation was a gift he needed to get from God. Since he was bent on doing things, Jesus offered him a much harder vocation. Jesus proved that he wasn't DOING as much as he thought he was. The life of an evangelist just wasn't for him, and his shame taught him that no amount of work is superior to any other, and there's nothing you can do to earn salvation.

There is no misquotation - that's precisely what your bible says. The man was asking what he will have to do to get that imaginary gift and your Jesus told him in no uncertain terms. Unless you believe that your Christ was lying to this guy and sending him on a fool's errand, the answer is pretty clear - give up your money to get into heaven. Your rationalization doesn't change that.

I know it doesn't. The same way I know that the extreme religious life is a road some people just choose to take. Their calling and not mine. We both get to the same place if we try hard enough.

And how do you know that? Because your religion tells you so?

That's not what you said a while ago:

So all children and the poor and are sad?

Poor, yes. Children - not so much.

That's precisely what I said. Children and poor alike need material possessions to be happy. Poor don't have them - children do, unless we are talking about poor children. Therefore, poor are sad, children - not so much.

What a child needs is love, like you said, and, even though life becomes difficult, a meal won't prevent him or her from taking joy in it's mother's arms.

Test your hypothesis. Give your children lots of love and free hugs instead of food and toys and see how happy and joyful they'd be.

Fine. Why do you need love to live, if not to survive?

Firstly, do you understand the difference between life and survival?

Then why DID you recieve those years of care? You didn't get a medal for being born, and, in fact, your existence was most likely disadvantageous to a family. Why not send you to an orphanage?

Because it wasn't disadvantageous to them. Their investment in me is paying off quite well.

The slippery slope. When you stray to far from the roots, you lose sight of the consequences.

Ah, the slippery slope fallacy. Do you even know what are the "consequences" that we might lose sight of?

---

I think a formal understanding of morals is no more necessary to moral activity than a formal understanding of grammar is to being an expert speaker of a language.

An excellent analogy. Especially given the fact that a formal understanding of grammar is required to be an expert speaker of a language.