Hexx wrote:Jenuall wrote:I do believe that the vast majority of people who follow Christianity just want to be good people, and that is probably true for most of the major faiths as well.
No one needs to follow a religion to be good.
Okay... I never said anyone had to follow a religion to be good?
Religious people can be good and bad, and non-religious people can be good and bad... Nothing I said contradicts that.
Hexx wrote:In fact personally across the world most of them (let's pick on Christians) do bad, but then get to pretend to be good despite objective evidence otherwise ("This magical omnipotent and omninciant being says I'm good so nurgghhh
"). But that's a different question.
Everyone "does bad" depending on how you classify bad. Running a red light is bad, eating a baby is bad etc. Christianity isn't about pretending you're not bad, in any way whatsoever, not sure what gave you that impression.
Moggy wrote:Jenuall wrote:Ultimately it’s something that I believe encourages me to live a better life than I might otherwise have done - in terms of being more generous with what I have to offer etc. I don’t obviously know if this is actually the case as I can’t compare how I would have lived the last 15 years of my life if I had carried on as an atheist, but I know there are helpful things I have done in that time which I can’t have seen me doing otherwise.
I know you don’t mean it this way, but that sounds a little like the “You’re an atheist? So why don’t you murder people?” line I have heard people say before.
Everyone has to live their lives the way they want to. As long as you’re not forced into it and it doesn’t hurt anybody else, then it’s all down to individual choice.
Never heard that line before and yes that's definitely not what I was getting at. All I'm saying is that until I was 20 I wasn't a Christian and there's no way of knowing if spending the last 15 years as one has actually made me a better person or not, I might well have gone on to be even more awesome if I'd stayed an atheist!
Agreed on the live your life the way you want point, like I say I don't see it as my purpose to go out and badger people into changing their way of life (again maybe this makes me a bad Christian in some people's eyes!) I think all of us have some responsibility to live a "good life" and the motivation that drives that and framework which is used to determine what is "good" will differ from person to person. If that's a religion great, if it's something else then excellent. I still wanted to be a good person before becoming a Christian!