Religious people, why not put your money where your mouth is?

[EGarrett]

Just a question to the religious people on the board. Specifically the Christians who post all these threads challenging the atheists.

Religious people constantly seem to talk about the strength of faith, "just knowing," and how sure they are.

So, if you believe as strongly as you say you do, would you favor letting rapists, murderers, etc. out of prison? After all, they're going to burn in hell, and if you believe so strongly in your eternal soul, then why are you worried about getting killed?

But if that's too strong, why not something more mild? Why persecute homosexual people or others who you think are doing things against God? Shouldn't you have faith that God will take care of that which he does and doesn't like?

(Just a hypothetical question. I think I know what the religious reply is going to be, but I think it might make for good conversation anyway.)

[Ratman_tf]

Originally posted by EGarrett

So, if you believe as strongly as you say you do, would you favor letting rapists, murderers, etc. out of prison? After all, they're going to burn in hell, and if you believe so strongly in your eternal soul, then why are you worried about getting killed?


I'm an atheist, but this argument bugs me. If God created the world and wanted people to live in it, he must have had some reason for doing so. I don't think religious types wouldn't worry about dying so much, but getting killed is usually a nasty affair to be avoided no matter what you believe.

[Roadtoad]

You forget, the Lord's Prayer states that the goal is to make things "on Earth as it is in Heaven." Ideally, you're trying to recreate Eden.

It's a fallacy, of course; people are fallen, and they fail to live up to divine ideals, but the Christian forgets this (conveniently), and figures that since he's now "perfected," it's time to work on everyone else, and bring everyone else in line with his perceived vision of what God want on this miserable rock.

What these folks fail to understand is that if you work on yourself, and develop the appropriate relationship with God as to who He is, and who you are, and what your response should be to His call, you naturally become something of a magnet to Christianity. You become the sort of person people want to be around, instead of the pain in the @$$ most Christians today are.

Instead, we have 1inChrist, whom I can't stand to read, spewing his "divinely inspired" filth.

And so it goes.

[c4ts]

I don't think they can fit all that money into a single mouth. Well, not the televangelists anyway.