this is the funniest thing ever.

Ah, now you're talking. Ethics. That is a word FREE of religious dogma, no?

Now you're playing on our field, LOGIC.

But you see life isn't black and white is it? But that is how Christians are programmed to see the world:
Good vs Bad
Christian vs Heathen
Gay vs Straight

So in reality we SHOULD NOT be discussing whether a person is "good" or "bad" at all. ONLY ACTIONS have good or bad results. And EVEN THEN, we cannot judge an action by its apparent results.

Why?

Because an objective observer cannot possibly know everything that happened before that led to the good or bad action. We cannot be certain either that what is apparently a bad action won't lead to some great good eventually.

This is where karma comes in. Christians and Muslims and Jews call it "God's will". Because we cannot know the "mind" of God, God's thinking behind his actions, we cannot likewise know a person's karmic destiny, based upon his/her actions in previous lives.

So that jailer at Abu Ghraib prison torturing a prisoner could just be a reversal of some Nazi concentration camp victim now torturing his former torturer in new lives.

In that case it becomes impossible to sort out who is good and who is bad. In fact the whole exercise of doing that loses its meaning.

So if it's not about who is good and who is bad, what is it about?

It's about ETHICS as you say and karma as I say. Christianity has NOTHING TO DO WITH whether we are good or bad people. So it should NEVER claim that someone did a good deed because they are a good Christian.

Perhaps they did a good deed because ethically it made sense.

Helping another fellow creature in need is a basic SURVIVAL INSTINCT, that exists in most social creatures down to ants. You can call it ethics if you like, but really it's our INSTINCT TO SURVIVE that leads us to do good deeds.

Giving a hungry person food helps our OWN survival, because it logically makes sense that if we help someone in need, someone will help us in need.

This has NOTHING TO DO with Jesus, Christianity or the bible.

In fact if we did NOT HAVE AND MAKE USE OF these survival instincts our species would've died out a million years ago.

So what you call ethics, what Christians call being a Good Christian is just BEING HUMAN.

Got it?

So the insidious LIE perpetuated by Christianity goes like this:
A Christian sees a person in need and decides to help them.
In this person's mind, they might be helping them because they think Jesus would do it.
So now they've done a "good deed" and awarded Jesus all the credit for their good deed.

So what's wrong with that?

Well first of all it was their idea to stop and help someone. By attributing the act to Jesus they've:
1. Denied their own INHERENT HUMANITY and ETHICS
2. Denied their own responsibility for their action (Jesus made me do it!)
3. Perpetuated the LIE that Jesus is responsible for the good deeds of good ppl.
4. More than likely took the opportunity to lay their own religion upon the person in need by witnessing and prostelitizing to them.

What this does that is counterproductive is removed responsibility for actions. So now it's a nice act, but if it's a bad act then the "Devil made me do it". So the person NEVER learns to accept full responsibility for their own actions.

 

Eggzactkely.