Re: Religion Thread: That's Me In the Corner...
The whole conversation about whether God "exists" or not to me is mostly a distraction or a sideshow. God said "Love your neighbor." So does every other major religion. So does the good and moral atheist.
There is more than one way to ground yourself in ethics, morality, and your responsibility to contribute to the common good.
What matters to the rest of us is how you behave, not what you believe.
Jesus Christ. As god is my witness, our assigned Redstate bot just made a good point.
Maybe there is something to divine inspiration.
I think it comes down to the following: what if you are given the choice, "be a good person" or "act in accordance with your faith." Kierkegaard agonized over this and eventually understood the full weight of divinity dictates that we should act in accordance with our faith. If you believe, then you are
wrong not to got up the hill fully intending to sacrifice Isaac. Something is wrong with your prioritization if you have superseded divine command with human morality.
Nobody wants to go full Kierkegaard, but he is exactly right in drawing out all the implications of the god concept. If god is to be taken at His word, then you say "where you want this killin' done?"
I'm with Huck Finn. "All right, then, I'll go to hell." You can either be a moral being with full responsibility, or follow the rules to avoid a smiting. Sartre took a couple thousand pages to say the same thing in incomprehensible jargon, but that's at the root of the Existential recognition that to be moral is to realize we are alone and we are in charge and nobody is there to help or scold us, so to the extent that we want to see good in the world we must make it. Humans are the only actors for good or evil. Everything else is just humming along its tracks.
