I assume you have examples? Because I've seen several claims of this sort, and so far they've all been rubbish.
Are you a linguist and statistician? If not, you lack the skills to make that determination.
Furthermore, there are several things described in the Book of Mormon that are quite clearly supported by history, but only discovered by scientists long after the Book of Mormon was published.
That's anecdotes not evidence. Furthermore, all major religions have those kinds of anecdotes, so they are not particularly convincing. I'm not enough of an expert on all those fields to counter every one of those anecdotes; I know enough about some fields to know that the Book of Mormon cannot be what it claims to be.
Ah, this old horse again. Any parent knows that the best way to raise children involves allowing the possibility they'll hurt themselves
It's a question of degree. Letting your kids play in the garden is fine even if they can hurt themselves. Torturing them, murdering them, and infecting them with horrible diseases is wrong, immoral, and illegal.
Are you telling me that your decision to not kill your neighbor is purely utilitarian? Because you're telling me that my decision to not kill my neighbor is purely utilitarian.
The cost of committing murder for me is a risk that I get caught and imprisonment or a few years lost off my life. There are many circumstances under which murder might be the rational choice for me and it is only my moral convictions that keep me back.
The cost of committing murder for Christians is eternal damnation, loss of paradise, etc., and since you assume God is omniscient, you cannot get away with it; if you truly believe that, you can never rationally choose to commit murder. Since murder is never rational for you, you never have to make a moral choice about it.
The point is that your religion can never make you moral, it can only make you obedient; if you're moral, it's because you are born that way. That's not true of other religions; some religions can make you moral, it is just your religion that can't.
This all comes back to free will. You are saying, if God existed, he would take away our free will, because we use it to hurt each other.
An omnipotent God could create a world in which we have free will and can learn from our mistakes, yet still can't do serious harm to each other. He did not. Worse yet, according to the Bible, God himself has tortured and murdered, even the innocent. I'm sorry, but the God you believe in is neither moral nor righteous nor perfect. He is merely powerful and demands obedience.
You can say Mormonism is false and fraudulent only if you know what it teaches and can show falsehood or fraud;)
There are many facts contradicting both Christianity and Mormonism. But for Mormonism, it's particularly simple: purely based on linguistic and historical criteria, it is clear that the Book of Mormon cannot have come into existence the way the Mormon church claims.
I claim to represent the beliefs of those who called themselves Christian two thousand years ago.
Well, you can claim that, but as a Mormon, the source materials you use don't support your claims.
The purpose of trademark law is not to give ownership of words to companies, it is to protect buyers. You don't need to protect buyers from confusing real products with hypothetical products.
Since there is no "Nexus-6 Android" shipping, I can't intend to buy one and accidentally end up with a "Nexus One" (or vice versa). Hence, there is no need to give Dick's estate a trademark.
On the contrary, I have a very concise and clear theology, you're just entirely unfamiliar with the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
This is the first time that you have admitted to being a member of LDS. Before that, you were just vague in what your religion actually was. So, before you came out as a member of LDS, I had no basis on which to debate Mormon theology with you.
However, I have no particular interest in debating Mormon theology with you since Mormonism is historically irrelevant. And whether Mormon theology and morality is superior to Catholic theology and morality really doesn't matter to me since both religions are false and fraudulent.
if believing Christ is the only path to salvation does not make me Christian, then nobody is Christian.
You can't just arbitrarily choose the meaning of words. What matters is that when people talk about "Christianity", they talk about the beliefs of most churches and individuals in the world that identify as Christian. It's misleading for you to pretend to represent their theology or beliefs.
You took my comment - that I would engage to some degree in these activities were I not religious - to a ridiculous extreme:
Yes, it's called "hyperbole"; look it up.
The point remains: if you are saying you would cheat on your wife if it weren't for your religion, I think there's something really wrong with you and your marriage.
And the same applies to other immoral choices: if you need religion to keep you from doing the wrong thing, there is something deeply wrong with you.
Statistically, of course, we know that people who are religious actually behave no better than the rest of society, so it isn't even working.
I don't think so. I'm willing to look at examples.
Well, apart from the torture and killings explicitly described in the Old Testament, God is responsible for all the suffering and death on earth today, since--being omnipotent--he has the means to prevent it.
By your logic, anyone living under any form of government - even a small one like a family - cannot make moral choices; while they may still "do the right thing", their desire to avoid the government's punishments means their choices are not moral, but merely utilitarian.
Not at all: many forms of immoral conduct are legal, and many forms of illegal conduct cannot realistically be punished. Therefore, people can make moral choices in their lives.
However, since in your religion God is all-knowing and all moral choices result in reward and punishment, there are no non-utilitarian choices left to you. Your religion has removed morality entirely from your life.
External influence does not negate whether I can actually choose to do something for morality's sake.
External influence in general doesn't necessarily, but the reward of paradise and eternal life and the threat of eternal damnation do. Christianity and Mormonism have set the stakes too high.
Good job extrapolating to the extreme. All I said was that I would most probably do those things to some degree, because right now I refrain from them for religious reasons.
There is nothing "extreme" or "extrapolative" about it. You said that religion was responsible for you refraining from those acts. That means nothing less than that if it were not for religion, you would engage in those acts. If you're saying that it is not in your nature to engage in those acts anyway, then your religion doesn't deserve the credit for preventing you from engaging in them.
If not, then why are you even arguing about this, since in such case all morality is arbitrary and therefore we're both right?
I don't know whether I'm right (no objective truth can ever be proven completely), but it is clear that you are wrong. You are wrong because your morality is based on demonstrably false assumptions about physical reality and because your morality is internally inconsistent.
Allow me to point out that if there is no religion - or rather, if there is no God - then there's no such thing as "morally correct" in an absolute sense.
Quite the opposite is true: all humans have the capacity to derive absolute morality through observation and deduction; even as a Christian (or whatever you are) you should accept that, since the Bible says so itself. Furthermore, God cannot be the source of absolute morality because God himself has frequently behaved immorally; the Bible gives numerous examples of that.
If you do, how do you reconcile that with claiming you don't need to believe in God to know what "morally correct" is?
I don't just claim that, I claim that your belief in God means that you have lost the capacity to make moral choices altogether; while you may still "do the right thing", your belief system means that your choice to do so is not a moral choice anymore, it is merely a utilitarian choice.
Yes, those groups all call themselves Christian, and yes, those groups make up the majority of the world's Christian population - but they do not represent Christianity in the sense that Christianity was taught in the Bible.
The idea that there is "the Bible" in a way that exists distinct from Christian churches is a fiction. The Bible was compiled, translated, and edited by those churches; it does not exist in a form separate from those churches. And what you read and conclude from that is a direct consequence of the choices that those churches made.
Furthermore, unless you can read Aramaic and Hebrew, you have no idea what the original Bible texts actually say since none of the translations commonly used in churches are even remotely faithful to the original texts.
So, your idea that there is something called "the Bible" or "the scriptures", something containing a clear theology that differs from Catholic or protestant theology or dogma is absurd. Christianity is not defined by the Bible or worship of Christ, Christianity is defined by the theology and dogma that Christians actually follow.
but you refuse to let me talk about Christianity as taught by the Bible.
That's because the notion that there is such a thing as "Christianity as taught by the Bible" is a fiction. It's a convenient fiction for people like you because the Bible is such an inconsistent and incoherent document that its raw text can be used to support anything from mass murder and genocide to complete pacifism.
I criticize Catholic theology and dogma not because the Popes were so evil, but because they actually have stated their theology and dogma clearly. You don't seem to have a firm theology at all, but, then, I've already concluded that you're not a Christian anyway.
You're incorrectly assuming that the purpose of trademark law is to allow companies to make money; it is not. The purpose of trademark law is to protect consumers against fake products.
Therefore, whether Google calling their phone the "Nexus One" prevents Dick's estate from endorsing anything is not relevant as far as trademark law is concerned.
Furthermore, you can't reserve trademarks for some arbitrary future date, you have to use them to ship an actual product. If you aren't shipping a product, you don't have a right to the trademark. So, unless Dick's estate is identifying a shipping product with the name "Nexus", a product that is confusable with Google's products, they are not entitled to trademark protection on the name.
But a novels and phones are entirely different product categories. Therefore, no confusion is possible, and the novel and the phone can co-exist even if both are trademarks.
Furthermore, Nexus One and Nexus-6 are distinct. You don't get the trademark for one just because you have the trademark for the other.
You can 'borrow' something from a novel but if you're going to be making money, hand over fist, with it you should probably get permission
No, you should not and you need not. Trademark law exists to protect consumers against fake products, it does not exist to make companies or novelists money. That's why trademarks are specific to a product category. Even though Google's phone is called the "Nexus One", I can sell apples under the name "Nexus One" and I don't have to ask Google for permission.
Dick doesn't own the name "Nexus". In fact, it is questionable whether Dick's estate has any trademark rights to the "Nexus" name at all, since they are obviously not offering a product for sale under that name. But even if they do, there is no conflict with Google.
Dick's estate is greedy and trying to cash in on Google's product. It's disgusting.
I'm pretty sure every major Christian church teaches what's referred to as the "golden rule", even the Catholic church...
But it also teaches a lot more. Therefore, the statement "it is little more than [the golden rule]" is incorrect.
You don't want to be treated with respect, regardless of your beliefs?
Neither Mormons nor Catholics do that, so clearly they are not even living by the golden rule themselves. But, no, I really don't care anyway whether Mormons or Catholics treat me with respect; why would I?
Did you have an example of what you mean by that?
Well, for example, I want to be let die if I fall into a coma, even if there is a possibility of recovery. I do not want to be resuscitated after a heart attack. I want to be able to commit suicide if I choose. I would have wanted my mother to have an abortion if she had not wanted me as a child. Etc.
I can think of several specific things I refrain from doing that I can attribute directly to my religion. [...] and, now that I am married, I do not have extramarital sex.
So you're saying that if you weren't religious you would have extramarital sex? What kind of loveless, depressing marriage do you live in that you can't be faithful to your wife for no other reason than that you love her?
It also implies that you believe people cannot change, which is also absurd. I have seen hundreds of people make real, meaningful improvements in their life
I didn't say that religion doesn't change people. I just gave you the benefit of the doubt, assuming that you actually were a naturally good person.
Based on your statements above, apparently I was wrong: you told us that if it weren't for your religion, you'd be a slut, you'd cheat on your wife, you'd be addicted to pornography, and you'd curse like a sailor.
So, I'm happy for you (and the rest of society) that religion keeps your deep, dark urges in check. But resisting those urges because your religion tells you to doesn't make you a moral person, it merely makes you an obedient person. You'd be a moral person only if you refrained from them because you innately knew that they are wrong, and for that, you don't need to be a Christian.
Take it from me, many other people don't need God or the Bible to tell them that killing, stealing, or cheating on their wife is wrong. I pity anybody who needs religion to figure that out.
According to Christianity, Christ was God's final revelation; there are and will be no further revelations or prophets. On this and on many other points, your opinion and views differ from nearly universally accepted Christian theology. Your religion may be Christ-based, but it is evidently not Christian.
Christianity is inherently immoral because of its theology. That would be true even if no Christian ever had committed any wrongs against other human beings.
The misdeeds of various Popes simply demonstrate that the theoretical moral failings of Christianity translate into practical failings: if even the Pope cannot refrain from murder--and justifying it in the name of Christianity--Christianity evidently also fails even as a practical means of achieving good behavior.
As for Catholic teachings and the Bible, Catholics would vehemently disagree with you that their teachings are contradicted by the Bible. And unlike you, they have scholarship and writings going back 2000 years explaining their position and viewpoints. So one can actually criticize them.
You appear to be Mormon. That means you may consider yourself a Christian, but in the eyes of most Christians on this earth, you are not a Christian at all. It is confusing to say the least if you make statements about the morality of Christianity as if you were actually a (mainstream) Christian.
It's easy to know what is moral and what is not when (between prayer, revelation, scriptures and prophets) you have a direct line to God;)
If it's so "easy", why are there so many differing opinions? Is everybody who reaches different conclusions from you just wrong? Or is morality relative and depends on the observer?
Christianity is little more than a giant commandment to treat people as you yourself would like to be treated.
That statement is inconsistent with two thousand years of Christian thought, teachings, and actions.
More importantly, the principle itself is wrong. I do not want to be treated like you want to be treated, and you don't want me to treat you like I want to be treated.
Would you say this religion is harmful to society? If so, how? If not, how then is it immoral?
You're again confusing utility with morality. If you get people to do the right thing by lying to them about the consequences, you have committed two immoral acts: first, you lied to them, and second, you deprived them of the ability to make their own moral choice by turning their choice into a utilitarian one.
If I do that for my whole life - if I treat people with respect and dignity, as I would like to be treated myself - how have I harmed society? If I haven't, then how is the religion immoral?
Immoral means can bring about desirable behavior; for example, the death penalty and lobotomies are immoral, but they are effective in preventing murder.
And for Christianity, we haven't even established efficacy. Chances are that the direct cause of how you behave towards other human beings is your biology; you'd behave exactly the same way if you had never heard of Christianity and had been raised Buddhist or atheist instead.
And yet they're the only basis you have for judging anyone, since you can't know their thoughts.
You have told me your thoughts: you say that the right thing to do is what God wishes you to do. I judge you based on that. I also judge Christianity based on its history and deeds.
So you see, adding religion does nothing but reduce the chances that a given person will kill! How, exactly, is this a bad thing?
We could also lobotomize that person and they would also be less likely to kill. But that doesn't make that person more moral, and it doesn't justify violating that person in that way. Christianity is little more than a spiritual lobotomy, taking away the ability to make moral choices, both through church doctrine and through law.
It's absurd to pretend that one cannot obey God for the sake of obedience, merely because God rewards obedience.
Neither makes you a moral person, it merely makes you an obedient and utilitarian person.
When your comments completely ignore direct and clear scriptures contradicting you
What difference does that make? Scripture is so ill-defined and inconsistent that you can use it to support almost anything. What matters is that a person recognized as being God's representative on earth by hundreds of millions of Christians has used scripture to justify torture and killing.
I'm glad that your personal interpretation of Christianity and scripture differs from his, but don't pretend to speak for Christianity in general.
One cannot both accept Christ and engage in immoral behavior; when you do something immoral, you are rejecting Christ, by definition.
What does that even mean? Was it moral when past Popes burned heretics at the stake? Or had those Popes failed to accept Christ?
Does burning non-believers at the stake count as killing? Does it fall under "thou shalt not kill" (or is that "thou shalt not murder")?
Or are you saying that no human being can know any of those things for certain? But if no human being can know those things, how can Christianity claim to teach morality at all?
I didn't say "Show me a Catholic leader that advocated violence." I said "Show me where the New Testament advocates violence." There's a vast difference.
Christianity is defined by what Christian churches teach and do, and Catholicism is by far the largest and most important of them.
Clearly, lip service is not enough; one must do the will of the Father. In order for Paul to be forgiven, he had to not merely stop harassing the local Christians, but he had to do that which God asked of him - that is, begin supporting the Christians.
A very revealing statement: what primarily matters to you is that Paul supported Christians. The fact that he was a torturer and murderer before doesn't matter to you, and you don't really ask the question of whether he continued torturing and murdering for Christianity (as his designated successors clearly did).
That sentence is self-contradictory. One cannot both accept Christ and engage in immoral behavior; when you do something immoral, you are rejecting Christ, by definition.
Oh, come on, that's absurd even within a purely Christian world view. Christians commit immoral acts all the time, and then go to confession or repent privately.
And that "by definition" is according to Christian morality, which is a false morality, cobbled together from universal morality on the one hand, and rules that serve the political ends of Christian churches on the other.
Christian doctrine is quite clear that causing others to suffer is a sin.
Christian doctrine is quite clear on many things, many of them mutually contradictory. People like you like to pull out whichever doctrine happens to fit the argument.
And terms like "cause" and "suffering" are also so general and vague as to be frequently meaningless. When Popes burned people at the stake for heresy, that was clearly causing suffering. But today, the Pope is still causing suffering and death by opposing the distribution of condoms and opposing gay marriage, although he would vehemently deny this.
By your logic, placing more importance on any goal than on the steps needed to reach it is morbid and obscene.
No, what is "morbid and obscene" is getting people to place more importance on the pleasure or suffering in an imaginary afterlife than on our current life. The term "morbid" refers to the fascination of Christianity with death.
There's no reason this can't be as true of reaching the afterlife as it is of losing 150 pounds.
Experiencing the consequences of weight loss doesn't require you to die, and those consequences are real, observable, and repeatable. That is not true of "paradise".
... and yet again, you're conveniently ignoring what it means to "accept Christ". Merely saying the words is not sufficient; you must actually change who you are.
That doesn't change the fact that your prior deeds don't matter once you accept Christ; you can drop dead immediately and you go to heaven according to Christian doctrine.
Furthermore, "changing who you are" in Christianity does not mean that you stop doing bad things; it may just mean that you feel bad about it afterwards and ask God for forgiveness.
And yet our entire legal system was based on Christian morals... How convenient that you neglect to mention that.
Most of those "morals" aren't Christian at all, they are universal and predate Christianity by millennia. Christians adopted these morals and are now trying to pretend that they somehow created them. And they Christians are trying to piggy-back some other politically motivated rules on top of these universal morals.
Can you please tell me a few things you think I've likely done (perhaps as a result of my religion) that you believe are immoral?
I'm sure that you are generally a fairly well-behaved person, but that doesn't automatically make you moral. Anybody can do the right thing when a gun is held to their head.
You are a moral person only if you do the right thing without coercion. As a Christian, you do not have that choice, since reward and punishment in the afterlife is always hanging over your head.
You would do well to judge people by their deeds,
Deeds are insufficient for judging people. You may not have killed because (1) you haven't had a need or opportunity to, (2) you are afraid of eternal damnation, or (3) you have an intrinsic aversion to killing. Only (3) makes you a good person; (2) is merely utilitarianism.
not by your own twisted interpretation of their beliefs.
I grew up Christian, Sunday school and everything. And there's nothing "twisted" about my interpretation, it's mainstream Christianity. We just differ on what the moral and ethical consequences of those mainstream beliefs are.
... unless you bother reading the new testament, which explicitly states that "faith without works is dead".
Christianity teaches that it is necessary and sufficient to accept Christ. Doing so wipes out all the evil you have done before; whether you still have any time left to do good deeds does not matter.
Everyone uses their views of morality as the basis for legislation, whether or not they're religious.
That is completely wrong. Many (most?) people see the law as utilitarian: as something that helps people stay out of each other's hair.
If I wanted to use morality as the basis for law, I'd outlaw Christianity because I consider it intrinsically immoral. But no amount of legislation will turn people like you into moral human beings; legislating morality just doesn't work; morality needs to be a voluntary, deliberate choice. Until you are ready to make that choice, the best the law can do is to keep you from getting into my hair.
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I assume you have examples? Because I've seen several claims of this sort, and so far they've all been rubbish.
Are you a linguist and statistician? If not, you lack the skills to make that determination.
Furthermore, there are several things described in the Book of Mormon that are quite clearly supported by history, but only discovered by scientists long after the Book of Mormon was published.
That's anecdotes not evidence. Furthermore, all major religions have those kinds of anecdotes, so they are not particularly convincing. I'm not enough of an expert on all those fields to counter every one of those anecdotes; I know enough about some fields to know that the Book of Mormon cannot be what it claims to be.
Ah, this old horse again. Any parent knows that the best way to raise children involves allowing the possibility they'll hurt themselves
It's a question of degree. Letting your kids play in the garden is fine even if they can hurt themselves. Torturing them, murdering them, and infecting them with horrible diseases is wrong, immoral, and illegal.
Are you telling me that your decision to not kill your neighbor is purely utilitarian? Because you're telling me that my decision to not kill my neighbor is purely utilitarian.
The cost of committing murder for me is a risk that I get caught and imprisonment or a few years lost off my life. There are many circumstances under which murder might be the rational choice for me and it is only my moral convictions that keep me back.
The cost of committing murder for Christians is eternal damnation, loss of paradise, etc., and since you assume God is omniscient, you cannot get away with it; if you truly believe that, you can never rationally choose to commit murder. Since murder is never rational for you, you never have to make a moral choice about it.
The point is that your religion can never make you moral, it can only make you obedient; if you're moral, it's because you are born that way. That's not true of other religions; some religions can make you moral, it is just your religion that can't.
This all comes back to free will. You are saying, if God existed, he would take away our free will, because we use it to hurt each other.
An omnipotent God could create a world in which we have free will and can learn from our mistakes, yet still can't do serious harm to each other. He did not. Worse yet, according to the Bible, God himself has tortured and murdered, even the innocent. I'm sorry, but the God you believe in is neither moral nor righteous nor perfect. He is merely powerful and demands obedience.
You can say Mormonism is false and fraudulent only if you know what it teaches and can show falsehood or fraud ;)
There are many facts contradicting both Christianity and Mormonism. But for Mormonism, it's particularly simple: purely based on linguistic and historical criteria, it is clear that the Book of Mormon cannot have come into existence the way the Mormon church claims.
I claim to represent the beliefs of those who called themselves Christian two thousand years ago.
Well, you can claim that, but as a Mormon, the source materials you use don't support your claims.
The purpose of trademark law is not to give ownership of words to companies, it is to protect buyers. You don't need to protect buyers from confusing real products with hypothetical products.
Since there is no "Nexus-6 Android" shipping, I can't intend to buy one and accidentally end up with a "Nexus One" (or vice versa). Hence, there is no need to give Dick's estate a trademark.
On the contrary, I have a very concise and clear theology, you're just entirely unfamiliar with the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
This is the first time that you have admitted to being a member of LDS. Before that, you were just vague in what your religion actually was. So, before you came out as a member of LDS, I had no basis on which to debate Mormon theology with you.
However, I have no particular interest in debating Mormon theology with you since Mormonism is historically irrelevant. And whether Mormon theology and morality is superior to Catholic theology and morality really doesn't matter to me since both religions are false and fraudulent.
if believing Christ is the only path to salvation does not make me Christian, then nobody is Christian.
You can't just arbitrarily choose the meaning of words. What matters is that when people talk about "Christianity", they talk about the beliefs of most churches and individuals in the world that identify as Christian. It's misleading for you to pretend to represent their theology or beliefs.
You took my comment - that I would engage to some degree in these activities were I not religious - to a ridiculous extreme:
Yes, it's called "hyperbole"; look it up.
The point remains: if you are saying you would cheat on your wife if it weren't for your religion, I think there's something really wrong with you and your marriage.
And the same applies to other immoral choices: if you need religion to keep you from doing the wrong thing, there is something deeply wrong with you.
Statistically, of course, we know that people who are religious actually behave no better than the rest of society, so it isn't even working.
I don't think so. I'm willing to look at examples.
Well, apart from the torture and killings explicitly described in the Old Testament, God is responsible for all the suffering and death on earth today, since--being omnipotent--he has the means to prevent it.
By your logic, anyone living under any form of government - even a small one like a family - cannot make moral choices; while they may still "do the right thing", their desire to avoid the government's punishments means their choices are not moral, but merely utilitarian.
Not at all: many forms of immoral conduct are legal, and many forms of illegal conduct cannot realistically be punished. Therefore, people can make moral choices in their lives.
However, since in your religion God is all-knowing and all moral choices result in reward and punishment, there are no non-utilitarian choices left to you. Your religion has removed morality entirely from your life.
External influence does not negate whether I can actually choose to do something for morality's sake.
External influence in general doesn't necessarily, but the reward of paradise and eternal life and the threat of eternal damnation do. Christianity and Mormonism have set the stakes too high.
Good job extrapolating to the extreme. All I said was that I would most probably do those things to some degree, because right now I refrain from them for religious reasons.
There is nothing "extreme" or "extrapolative" about it. You said that religion was responsible for you refraining from those acts. That means nothing less than that if it were not for religion, you would engage in those acts. If you're saying that it is not in your nature to engage in those acts anyway, then your religion doesn't deserve the credit for preventing you from engaging in them.
If not, then why are you even arguing about this, since in such case all morality is arbitrary and therefore we're both right?
I don't know whether I'm right (no objective truth can ever be proven completely), but it is clear that you are wrong. You are wrong because your morality is based on demonstrably false assumptions about physical reality and because your morality is internally inconsistent.
Allow me to point out that if there is no religion - or rather, if there is no God - then there's no such thing as "morally correct" in an absolute sense.
Quite the opposite is true: all humans have the capacity to derive absolute morality through observation and deduction; even as a Christian (or whatever you are) you should accept that, since the Bible says so itself. Furthermore, God cannot be the source of absolute morality because God himself has frequently behaved immorally; the Bible gives numerous examples of that.
If you do, how do you reconcile that with claiming you don't need to believe in God to know what "morally correct" is?
I don't just claim that, I claim that your belief in God means that you have lost the capacity to make moral choices altogether; while you may still "do the right thing", your belief system means that your choice to do so is not a moral choice anymore, it is merely a utilitarian choice.
Yes, those groups all call themselves Christian, and yes, those groups make up the majority of the world's Christian population - but they do not represent Christianity in the sense that Christianity was taught in the Bible.
The idea that there is "the Bible" in a way that exists distinct from Christian churches is a fiction. The Bible was compiled, translated, and edited by those churches; it does not exist in a form separate from those churches. And what you read and conclude from that is a direct consequence of the choices that those churches made.
Furthermore, unless you can read Aramaic and Hebrew, you have no idea what the original Bible texts actually say since none of the translations commonly used in churches are even remotely faithful to the original texts.
So, your idea that there is something called "the Bible" or "the scriptures", something containing a clear theology that differs from Catholic or protestant theology or dogma is absurd. Christianity is not defined by the Bible or worship of Christ, Christianity is defined by the theology and dogma that Christians actually follow.
but you refuse to let me talk about Christianity as taught by the Bible.
That's because the notion that there is such a thing as "Christianity as taught by the Bible" is a fiction. It's a convenient fiction for people like you because the Bible is such an inconsistent and incoherent document that its raw text can be used to support anything from mass murder and genocide to complete pacifism.
I criticize Catholic theology and dogma not because the Popes were so evil, but because they actually have stated their theology and dogma clearly. You don't seem to have a firm theology at all, but, then, I've already concluded that you're not a Christian anyway.
Google should rename the "Nexus One" to "Dickhead One". Let's see whether Dick's estate wants to claim ownership of that name :-)
Well, and that's wrong too. But just because Lucas got away with it doesn't mean we have to compound the injustice by inflicting it on more people.
You're incorrectly assuming that the purpose of trademark law is to allow companies to make money; it is not. The purpose of trademark law is to protect consumers against fake products.
Therefore, whether Google calling their phone the "Nexus One" prevents Dick's estate from endorsing anything is not relevant as far as trademark law is concerned.
Furthermore, you can't reserve trademarks for some arbitrary future date, you have to use them to ship an actual product. If you aren't shipping a product, you don't have a right to the trademark. So, unless Dick's estate is identifying a shipping product with the name "Nexus", a product that is confusable with Google's products, they are not entitled to trademark protection on the name.
But a novels and phones are entirely different product categories. Therefore, no confusion is possible, and the novel and the phone can co-exist even if both are trademarks.
Furthermore, Nexus One and Nexus-6 are distinct. You don't get the trademark for one just because you have the trademark for the other.
You can 'borrow' something from a novel but if you're going to be making money, hand over fist, with it you should probably get permission
No, you should not and you need not. Trademark law exists to protect consumers against fake products, it does not exist to make companies or novelists money. That's why trademarks are specific to a product category. Even though Google's phone is called the "Nexus One", I can sell apples under the name "Nexus One" and I don't have to ask Google for permission.
Dick doesn't own the name "Nexus". In fact, it is questionable whether Dick's estate has any trademark rights to the "Nexus" name at all, since they are obviously not offering a product for sale under that name. But even if they do, there is no conflict with Google.
Dick's estate is greedy and trying to cash in on Google's product. It's disgusting.
I'm pretty sure every major Christian church teaches what's referred to as the "golden rule", even the Catholic church...
But it also teaches a lot more. Therefore, the statement "it is little more than [the golden rule]" is incorrect.
You don't want to be treated with respect, regardless of your beliefs?
Neither Mormons nor Catholics do that, so clearly they are not even living by the golden rule themselves. But, no, I really don't care anyway whether Mormons or Catholics treat me with respect; why would I?
Did you have an example of what you mean by that?
Well, for example, I want to be let die if I fall into a coma, even if there is a possibility of recovery. I do not want to be resuscitated after a heart attack. I want to be able to commit suicide if I choose. I would have wanted my mother to have an abortion if she had not wanted me as a child. Etc.
I can think of several specific things I refrain from doing that I can attribute directly to my religion. [...] and, now that I am married, I do not have extramarital sex.
So you're saying that if you weren't religious you would have extramarital sex? What kind of loveless, depressing marriage do you live in that you can't be faithful to your wife for no other reason than that you love her?
It also implies that you believe people cannot change, which is also absurd. I have seen hundreds of people make real, meaningful improvements in their life
I didn't say that religion doesn't change people. I just gave you the benefit of the doubt, assuming that you actually were a naturally good person.
Based on your statements above, apparently I was wrong: you told us that if it weren't for your religion, you'd be a slut, you'd cheat on your wife, you'd be addicted to pornography, and you'd curse like a sailor.
So, I'm happy for you (and the rest of society) that religion keeps your deep, dark urges in check. But resisting those urges because your religion tells you to doesn't make you a moral person, it merely makes you an obedient person. You'd be a moral person only if you refrained from them because you innately knew that they are wrong, and for that, you don't need to be a Christian.
Take it from me, many other people don't need God or the Bible to tell them that killing, stealing, or cheating on their wife is wrong. I pity anybody who needs religion to figure that out.
According to Christianity, Christ was God's final revelation; there are and will be no further revelations or prophets. On this and on many other points, your opinion and views differ from nearly universally accepted Christian theology. Your religion may be Christ-based, but it is evidently not Christian.
Christianity is inherently immoral because of its theology. That would be true even if no Christian ever had committed any wrongs against other human beings.
The misdeeds of various Popes simply demonstrate that the theoretical moral failings of Christianity translate into practical failings: if even the Pope cannot refrain from murder--and justifying it in the name of Christianity--Christianity evidently also fails even as a practical means of achieving good behavior.
As for Catholic teachings and the Bible, Catholics would vehemently disagree with you that their teachings are contradicted by the Bible. And unlike you, they have scholarship and writings going back 2000 years explaining their position and viewpoints. So one can actually criticize them.
You appear to be Mormon. That means you may consider yourself a Christian, but in the eyes of most Christians on this earth, you are not a Christian at all. It is confusing to say the least if you make statements about the morality of Christianity as if you were actually a (mainstream) Christian.
It's easy to know what is moral and what is not when (between prayer, revelation, scriptures and prophets) you have a direct line to God ;)
If it's so "easy", why are there so many differing opinions? Is everybody who reaches different conclusions from you just wrong? Or is morality relative and depends on the observer?
Christianity is little more than a giant commandment to treat people as you yourself would like to be treated.
That statement is inconsistent with two thousand years of Christian thought, teachings, and actions.
More importantly, the principle itself is wrong. I do not want to be treated like you want to be treated, and you don't want me to treat you like I want to be treated.
Would you say this religion is harmful to society? If so, how? If not, how then is it immoral?
You're again confusing utility with morality. If you get people to do the right thing by lying to them about the consequences, you have committed two immoral acts: first, you lied to them, and second, you deprived them of the ability to make their own moral choice by turning their choice into a utilitarian one.
If I do that for my whole life - if I treat people with respect and dignity, as I would like to be treated myself - how have I harmed society? If I haven't, then how is the religion immoral?
Immoral means can bring about desirable behavior; for example, the death penalty and lobotomies are immoral, but they are effective in preventing murder.
And for Christianity, we haven't even established efficacy. Chances are that the direct cause of how you behave towards other human beings is your biology; you'd behave exactly the same way if you had never heard of Christianity and had been raised Buddhist or atheist instead.
And yet they're the only basis you have for judging anyone, since you can't know their thoughts.
You have told me your thoughts: you say that the right thing to do is what God wishes you to do. I judge you based on that. I also judge Christianity based on its history and deeds.
So you see, adding religion does nothing but reduce the chances that a given person will kill! How, exactly, is this a bad thing?
We could also lobotomize that person and they would also be less likely to kill. But that doesn't make that person more moral, and it doesn't justify violating that person in that way. Christianity is little more than a spiritual lobotomy, taking away the ability to make moral choices, both through church doctrine and through law.
It's absurd to pretend that one cannot obey God for the sake of obedience, merely because God rewards obedience.
Neither makes you a moral person, it merely makes you an obedient and utilitarian person.
When your comments completely ignore direct and clear scriptures contradicting you
What difference does that make? Scripture is so ill-defined and inconsistent that you can use it to support almost anything. What matters is that a person recognized as being God's representative on earth by hundreds of millions of Christians has used scripture to justify torture and killing.
I'm glad that your personal interpretation of Christianity and scripture differs from his, but don't pretend to speak for Christianity in general.
One cannot both accept Christ and engage in immoral behavior; when you do something immoral, you are rejecting Christ, by definition.
What does that even mean? Was it moral when past Popes burned heretics at the stake? Or had those Popes failed to accept Christ?
Does burning non-believers at the stake count as killing? Does it fall under "thou shalt not kill" (or is that "thou shalt not murder")?
Or are you saying that no human being can know any of those things for certain? But if no human being can know those things, how can Christianity claim to teach morality at all?
I didn't say "Show me a Catholic leader that advocated violence." I said "Show me where the New Testament advocates violence." There's a vast difference.
Christianity is defined by what Christian churches teach and do, and Catholicism is by far the largest and most important of them.
Clearly, lip service is not enough; one must do the will of the Father. In order for Paul to be forgiven, he had to not merely stop harassing the local Christians, but he had to do that which God asked of him - that is, begin supporting the Christians.
A very revealing statement: what primarily matters to you is that Paul supported Christians. The fact that he was a torturer and murderer before doesn't matter to you, and you don't really ask the question of whether he continued torturing and murdering for Christianity (as his designated successors clearly did).
That sentence is self-contradictory. One cannot both accept Christ and engage in immoral behavior; when you do something immoral, you are rejecting Christ, by definition.
Oh, come on, that's absurd even within a purely Christian world view. Christians commit immoral acts all the time, and then go to confession or repent privately.
And that "by definition" is according to Christian morality, which is a false morality, cobbled together from universal morality on the one hand, and rules that serve the political ends of Christian churches on the other.
Christian doctrine is quite clear that causing others to suffer is a sin.
Christian doctrine is quite clear on many things, many of them mutually contradictory. People like you like to pull out whichever doctrine happens to fit the argument.
And terms like "cause" and "suffering" are also so general and vague as to be frequently meaningless. When Popes burned people at the stake for heresy, that was clearly causing suffering. But today, the Pope is still causing suffering and death by opposing the distribution of condoms and opposing gay marriage, although he would vehemently deny this.
By your logic, placing more importance on any goal than on the steps needed to reach it is morbid and obscene.
No, what is "morbid and obscene" is getting people to place more importance on the pleasure or suffering in an imaginary afterlife than on our current life. The term "morbid" refers to the fascination of Christianity with death.
There's no reason this can't be as true of reaching the afterlife as it is of losing 150 pounds.
Experiencing the consequences of weight loss doesn't require you to die, and those consequences are real, observable, and repeatable. That is not true of "paradise".
... and yet again, you're conveniently ignoring what it means to "accept Christ". Merely saying the words is not sufficient; you must actually change who you are.
That doesn't change the fact that your prior deeds don't matter once you accept Christ; you can drop dead immediately and you go to heaven according to Christian doctrine.
Furthermore, "changing who you are" in Christianity does not mean that you stop doing bad things; it may just mean that you feel bad about it afterwards and ask God for forgiveness.
And yet our entire legal system was based on Christian morals... How convenient that you neglect to mention that.
Most of those "morals" aren't Christian at all, they are universal and predate Christianity by millennia. Christians adopted these morals and are now trying to pretend that they somehow created them. And they Christians are trying to piggy-back some other politically motivated rules on top of these universal morals.
Can you please tell me a few things you think I've likely done (perhaps as a result of my religion) that you believe are immoral?
I'm sure that you are generally a fairly well-behaved person, but that doesn't automatically make you moral. Anybody can do the right thing when a gun is held to their head.
You are a moral person only if you do the right thing without coercion. As a Christian, you do not have that choice, since reward and punishment in the afterlife is always hanging over your head.
You would do well to judge people by their deeds,
Deeds are insufficient for judging people. You may not have killed because (1) you haven't had a need or opportunity to, (2) you are afraid of eternal damnation, or (3) you have an intrinsic aversion to killing. Only (3) makes you a good person; (2) is merely utilitarianism.
not by your own twisted interpretation of their beliefs.
I grew up Christian, Sunday school and everything. And there's nothing "twisted" about my interpretation, it's mainstream Christianity. We just differ on what the moral and ethical consequences of those mainstream beliefs are.
and we're here to help you.
... unless you bother reading the new testament, which explicitly states that "faith without works is dead".
Christianity teaches that it is necessary and sufficient to accept Christ. Doing so wipes out all the evil you have done before; whether you still have any time left to do good deeds does not matter.
Everyone uses their views of morality as the basis for legislation, whether or not they're religious.
That is completely wrong. Many (most?) people see the law as utilitarian: as something that helps people stay out of each other's hair.
If I wanted to use morality as the basis for law, I'd outlaw Christianity because I consider it intrinsically immoral. But no amount of legislation will turn people like you into moral human beings; legislating morality just doesn't work; morality needs to be a voluntary, deliberate choice. Until you are ready to make that choice, the best the law can do is to keep you from getting into my hair.