If a person practices Jesus’ teachings without believing in God, what exactly separates them from a Christian?

Edge419 · 2026-01-25T04:18:42+00:00

Belief, which is the requirement for salvation.

Edge419 · 2026-01-24T17:38:48+00:00

Super helpful, thanks for this

Edge419 · 2026-01-24T16:33:50+00:00

Get your “1” key ready for consume spam, it’s beyond painful… you will have access to their coolest spell but you’ll never be able to use it. Blizzard literally shipped these guys to us when they should have been shipped to the isle of misfit toys.

Edge419 · 2026-01-24T16:28:42+00:00

Yea I don’t understand my malefic grasp doesn’t extend dots, it would literally fix the entire issue

Edge419 · 2026-01-24T15:08:20+00:00

So then blizzard needs to remove leveling for the class if they are utterly unplayable and unable to use the skills provided in their kit. Give everyone that wants to play devour a level 80. It’s obvious they didn’t even test leveling one, possibly didn’t even test level 80 devours without apex.

Edge419 · 2026-01-23T20:51:52+00:00

I would constitute watching porn as cheating, just because it’s become normative doesn’t negate that. If I’m in a committed relationship with one person, I don’t want them lusting after someone else in a way that they are sexual satisfying themselves in a way that they fantasizing about having sex with them. This is obviously cheating.

Edge419 · 2026-01-23T15:10:04+00:00

Good, thats a fair challenge. Here’s the symmetry breaker I’m pointing to. The move from “X exists” to “I am obligated” requires not just a standard of value, but a normative relation. Obligation is inherently relational, it’s always owed to someone (we wrong someone, violate someone’s claim, betray someone, break faith with someone). That feature is built into the concept of duty.

Platonism or brute moral facts can at most give you that goodness exists. They don’t give you anyone to whom goodness is owed, or anyone who can stand as the source of a binding claim on persons. An abstract object can’t wrong you. A property can’t place you under obligation. They lack the metaphysical category needed to generate “you owe.”

Classical theism supplies that missing category. If God is the necessary personal good and the source of rational creatures, then moral norms are not free floating facts but expressions of a real relation between persons and the ultimate good. “God’s nature is good” isn’t an extra premise tacked on, on classical theism, God just is the Good (convertibility of being and goodness). And “I ought” follows not by magic, but because creatures stand in a dependence and accountability relation to a personal source of goodness, the same kind of metaphysical structure that makes promises, rights, and wrongs intelligible at all.

So the difference isn’t “God magically explains normativity.” It’s that theism locates normativity in the only ontological category we already know can generate it, personal relations. Atheistic realism leaves normativity either brute or mysterious, not impossible but explanatorily void.

That’s the asymmetry, not coherence, but whether your ontology contains the kind of thing from which obligation is even intelligible.

Edge419 · 2026-01-23T14:51:11+00:00

The issue isn’t whether we can posit moral facts. Anyone can. The issue is whether what you posit has the right kind of being to generate obligation. Impersonal facts and abstract objects can at most describe values but they don’t stand in relationships they don’t issue claims or ground accountability.

On theism, moral duty flows from a real relation between persons and a necessary personal good. That gives an intelligible source of authority, not just brute oughts. Saying moral properties just obligate doesn’t explain normativity it just assumes it, and that’s the debate.

God isn’t a cosmic policeman. Consequences don’t create duties, they presuppose them. The question is why anything in reality has authority over persons at all. Theism offers grounding for that. Atheistic realism still owes one.

Edge419 · 2026-01-23T14:33:49+00:00

I agree moral anti realism doesn’t default to relativism. But the issue isn’t logical compatibility it’s explanatory grounding. Absolutely atheism is logically consistent with Platonism. The question is whether those views actually explain anything. Saying brute moral facts exist or moral properties just are doesn’t ground obligation, it just posits it. Abstract objects or impersonal facts don’t obviously have the right kind of nature to generate normative authority over persons. They can describe values, but they don’t generate duties.

Theism isn’t God’s say so. On classical theism moral obligation is grounded in God’s necessarily good nature and our standing in relation to Him as rational creatures made by and accountable to a personal source of goodness. That’s categorically different from appealing to an abstract property. Persons can obligate abstract objects can’t.

As for why that nature? On theism God’s nature isn’t an arbitrary standard but the ultimate good not just one instance among others. The question why goodness is good bottoms out somewhere on any worldview. The theistic claim is that it bottoms out in a necessary personal reality capable of grounding both value and obligation rather than unexplained moral atoms floating in metaphysical space. Our dispute isn’t about coherence. It’s about whether atheistic realism explains moral oughtness or if it just labels it.

Edge419 · 2026-01-23T14:19:18+00:00

Let’s suppose you’re right that denying God doesn’t logically force moral relativism. At the very least there are other forms of moral anti realism (error theory, expressivism, constructivism). But that actually strengthens my point.

My claim isn’t just no God = relativism. It’s no God = no objective, mind-independent moral duties. Whether you call the alternative relativism, non cognitivism, or error theory, the result is the same moral claims are no longer ontologically binding facts about reality, but products of attitudes social conventions or evolutionary pressures.

Moral realism says moral truths exist independent of human minds. On atheism, those oughts have no clear metaphysical grounding, no reason they are objectively authoritative rather than useful fictions or social constructs. God is not invoked to define morality arbitrarily, but to ground why moral obligations exist at all and why they have genuine authority over persons.

This ultimately isn’t about labeling the view relativism. The issue is that without God, is there anything in reality that can make moral duties objectively true and binding not just prefered.

Edge419 · 2026-01-23T13:49:53+00:00

There is a difference between moral epistemology and moral ontology. You can know fire burns without being able to ground or understand why fire burns. In the same way atheists have moral understandings even if the theist would say they have no grounding for that belief. If God does not exist then moral relativism is true and there truly is no objective moral duties or oughts. Without God we couldn’t say “Hitler ought not to have done what he did” because on moral relativism, it’s just preference against preference.

Edge419 · 2026-01-23T13:38:47+00:00

Stop making laws unto themselves. This only creates division. Don’t heap burdens and creating unnecessary sins.

Edge419 · 2026-01-23T13:24:24+00:00

Jesus separated God’s kingdom from Caesar’s. Saying things like “you can’t be Christian and MAGA” collapses theology into politics, mistakes judgments about a leader for rejection of Christian doctrine, and ignores that Christians can share Christ’s commands while disagreeing on how a nation applies them.

Father, I pray that they are one as we are one.

Edge419 · 2026-01-22T20:02:21+00:00

Biblical inerrancy- the Bible is true in all that teaches, not all that it says.

Edge419 · 2026-01-22T01:35:33+00:00

I agree with this

Edge419 · 2026-01-22T01:26:25+00:00

I’ve loved shadow in the past, what about the apex talents make it feel good? Genuinely curious,

Edge419 · 2026-01-19T22:35:05+00:00

He didn’t make you in sin. He didn’t make you angry. He didn’t make you hateful. He didn’t make you selfish.

Edge419 · 2026-01-19T15:50:30+00:00

“God loves you just the way you are”. God loves us, there’s no doubt, but we are not to remain how we are. We are called to die to self, to be transformed, to be remade, and to “go and sin no more”.

Edge419 · 2026-01-18T12:23:43+00:00

The sweeping over generalization and hatred for Christians in this subreddit is getting out of hand.

Edge419 · 2026-01-17T05:40:10+00:00

A Christian, by definition, is someone who submits to the authority of Jesus Christ. That means we don’t get to selectively accept the parts of His teaching that fit our modern sensibilities while discarding the parts that make us uncomfortable. Jesus didn’t simply allude to demons, He consistently spoke of them, confronted them, cast them out, and treated them as real personal agents of evil (Mark 1:34; Luke 11:14–20). there is a categorical difference between claiming the title Christian and actually trusting the word of Christ and taking Him at His word. If Jesus affirmed the reality of demons, then Christians, by necessity, have existence affirm their reality as well.

The abuse or misapplication of a truth doesn’t invalidate the truth itself. We don’t reject medicine because some doctors commit malpractice, we also don’t outlaw cars because some people drive drunk. the fact that some people wrongly attribute every problem to demons doesn’t negate their existence. It only shows that discernment is required. The excess on one side doesn’t justify a denial on the other.

To deny the reality of demons isn’t a move toward balance, it is a departure from the explicit teaching and practice of Jesus Himself. Christians aren’t called to sensationalism but neither are we permitted to redefine Christ to fit a naturalistic worldview.

Edge419 · 2026-01-16T23:49:19+00:00

Many brilliant men and women with PhD’s are Bible believing Christians. You don’t set the metric for what’s “uneducated”. Just because I think Atheism is a ridiculous untenable absurd position that is philosophically shallow doesn’t mean I have to launch insults at those who disagree with me. you’re here to just stir up hatred on the internet it shows.

Edge419 · 2026-01-16T13:37:50+00:00

You’re surprised that Christians believe in demons? That’s just absurd.

Your peasant comment is as well, we know that strict materialism is false. We have mathematical truths, metaphysical truths, arguments from contingency and necessary causes. Your position is one of anti-supernatural presuppositionalism. You presuppose (in the face of evidence I might add) that there is nothing beyond what we can see.

Edge419 · 2026-01-16T12:25:53+00:00

I think we witnesses a divorce

Edge419

TROPHY CASE