(October 14, 2014 at 9:17 am)Esquilax Wrote: If you have information that you believe to be the divine architect of reality, with commandments that are supposed to be the ultimate in moral goodness, all contained within what's supposed to be the backbone of your religious beliefs, and you pick and choose which of those you want to follow, then you are being inconsistent with your position. Either you don't really believe in the moral or factual accuracy of the commandments, or you don't care about the authority of the source. Either way, the potency of your religion is now reduced, by the fact that you've deemed yourself the arbiter of your supposed religious instruction.
Far be it from me to say whether they are or are not a True Whatever, but what I will say is that they aren't comporting themselves in a manner consistent with the claimed origins of the information they accept.
That's a big if - and that is, I believe the point this moderate is trying to make. Most of the religious people don't the information to be the divine architect of reality and/or they don't believe it to contain ultimate moral goodness and/or they don't regard it as the backbone of their religious beliefs. What he'd probably argue is that the capacity to be the arbiter of religious instruction is what gives religion its true potency (bring morals to the scripture and not morals from the scripture).
