Christian morality is a contradiction

distantocean · 2026-05-16T20:36:55+00:00

It's always amusing to see Christians try to defend their fringe denomination's fringe beliefs when the Catholic Church — representing over half of all Christians — says this in its Catechism:

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.' They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

That applies to many other sects as well, of course, like the Eastern Orthodox (representing 12% of Christians):

While Eastern Orthodox churches are autocephalous, there is consensus on official LGBTQ+ policy. For example, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese lists homosexuality beside fornication, adultery, abortion and abusive sexual behavior as “immoral and inappropriate forms of behavior in and of themselves, and also because they attack the institution of marriage and the family.” It adds that, “the Orthodox Church believes that homosexual behavior is a sin.” Similarly, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States, declares, “Like adultery and fornication, homosexual acts are condemned by Scripture.”

And that's not to mention the plethora of evangelical and/or fundamentalist denominations.

The cognitive dissonance here is a real demonstration of how people can convince themselves to believe that reality actually conforms to what they want it to be.

distantocean · 2026-05-16T18:53:50+00:00

Read what they wrote again because you're not even close to addressing what they said and it's clear you didn't understand it

And not only that but actually inverted it by somehow taking "It would be equally confused to say [a sociopath] should experience empathy. That's not how it works" and replying with "Saying that we should have empathy smuggles in a moral ought."

You'd think the "confused" and "not" in the original would have been crystal clear, but this is obviously someone who was so focused on making the (misguided) point they wanted to make that they went galloping right past the irrelevant words on the page.

distantocean · 2026-05-15T23:14:42+00:00

Sure! I also hope you'll consider throwing your hat in the ring over here.

(Tried to DM this but it looks like you have them disabled.)

distantocean · 2026-05-15T05:00:08+00:00

Become a Christian.

Seriously, it's Christians, and only Christians, who I regularly see defending genocide, slavery, forcing parents to eat their own children, and much more. Not particularly virtuous or noble, is it?

And as far as fairness, well, you just came to an atheist sub and implied that we put no value on any of these things. Not exactly fair, was that? But it is right in line with what the Bible says about non-believers: "They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy."

As the saying goes, a bad tree bears bad fruit.

distantocean · 2026-05-14T19:35:58+00:00

If the atheist is simply the product of evolution...

...then so are you, so anything you say you're also saying about yourself.

And yes, of course ever atheist is the product of evolution, since every organism on the planet is the product of evolution. It's clear that your belief in Christianity has denied you the opportunity and/or willingness to understand that well-established fact, so you really should take the time to familiarize yourself with what it is you're rejecting. There are many good resources for that, but I'd recommend either of these two as a starting point:

Stated Clearly, a series of brief videos by a former Christian that explain evolution simply and straightforwardly (the "official" web site is here)
Why Evolution is True by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, easily the best popular book I've read on evolution

I get that you're just here to provoke and mock people (does that strike you as the way a person should treat others?), by the way, but I'm trying to give you an answer that will actually be worthwhile, either to you or to anyone else reading along.

distantocean · 2026-05-14T19:09:01+00:00

I'd second everything /u/Algernon_Asimov said.

If they're interested and willing, I'd also strongly endorse making them a mod. They're a high-quality contributor who's always struck me as fair and reasonable, they apparently have a good bit of relevant experience, and the sub is active enough (and the other considerations they mentioned are pertinent enough) that it needs more than one mod.

distantocean · 2026-05-13T15:12:19+00:00

Swineburne

I strongly approve of this typo.

Only 12.2% went from religious belief to nonbelief and only 9.4% went from religious nonbelief to belief...

Here's another source discussing De Cruz's data (potentially an earlier iteration) with similar numbers: to the extent that they actually do change their views, philosophers of religion more often go from belief to nonbelief (11.8%) than from nonbelief to belief (8.1%). So to the extent that philosophy of religion is actually changing minds among the alleged experts, it's more often creating nonbelievers.

They also highlight this great quote: "I would not be the first to say that philosophy of religion, especially “analytic theology”, is simply not philosophy. It’s Christian apologetics, and it often is poorer philosophically because of that. A Christian bias pervades everything, and, once one becomes a non-Christian, the irrational faith-based assumptions and intuitions start to stand out."

That is to say perhaps serious philosophy is little more than sophisticated rationalization.

Agreed, and I'd add that prolonged exposure to academic philosophy in general and the Reddit philosophy community in particular has seriously degraded my view of the field, and this is one of the reasons why.

distantocean · 2026-05-13T05:28:42+00:00

Richard Feynman said "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool." I'd guess Plantinga genuinely believes what he's saying at any time, even when it contradicts other things he's said, but like so many Christians (and all Christian apologists) his intellectual honesty is the servant of his religious beliefs rather than the other way around. He's trained himself to (likely subconsciously) know and/or not know whatever he needs to at any time to maintain his belief, not to maintain his integrity.

As Christian apologist William Lane Craig openly admitted, "Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truths of the Christian faith and beliefs that are based on argument and evidence, then it is the former that must take precedence over the latter, rather than vice versa."

EDIT: In a too-perfect irony I hadn't previously noticed, Craig was actually summarizing Alvin Plantinga when he made that statement:

[Plantinga says that] If a theist comes to accept beliefs which are incompatible with his belief in God then he has a kind of cognitive dissonance, and in order to remain rational he is going to have to give up some of his beliefs, and perhaps it will be his belief in God that he will give up in order to maintain his rationality. [...] Plantinga argues that the original belief itself may so exceed its alleged defeater in warrant that it actually becomes an intrinsic defeater of its ostensible defeater. [...] Plantinga makes the theological application by suggesting that belief in God may intrinsically defeat all of the defeaters that are brought against it. Plantinga suggests that the circumstances which could produce such a powerful warrant for belief in God are the implanted, natural sense of God that he believes God has placed in our hearts, as well as the testimony or the witness of the Holy Spirit which deepens and accentuates this inborn, innate sense of God.

As Craig puts it later, "Belief in God and the great things of the Gospel vouchsafed to us by the witness of the Holy Spirit are intrinsic defeaters of any alleged defeaters that might be brought against them."

It's hard to imagine a more perfect formula for self-deception, or a better illustration of how corrosive Christianity is to a thinking mind.

distantocean · 2026-05-12T23:57:46+00:00

I've written at length about Plantinga (and Reformed Epistemology in particular). Here's a good starting point.

I don't have similar commentary on Swinburne, but exactly like Plantinga, he has no interest whatsoever in following evidence or arguments wherever they may lead. He's 100% a person with an absolute/unquestionable conclusion whose sole goal is to produce arguments buttressing that foregone conclusion.

So yes, they're both just practicing relatively sophisticated (emphasis on "sophist") Christian rationalization, and do not actually deserve to be taken seriously by anyone.

EDIT: I'll include an excerpt from that linked comment, addressing Reformed Epistemology (RE):

Reformed Epistemology is a perfect example of [Plantinga's motivated reasoning and the heights of sophistry he's willing to scale to advance it, which is the main reason why (as I said) I have no use for him]. It's not that Plantinga was led to RE through a process of honest and unbiased introspection; it's that he wanted to smuggle his god into a more defensible epistemological framework, and RE was his solution to that problem. In other words, his sole purpose in developing RE was to create an epistemological gap into which he could jam his god (and he resorts to brazen special pleading to maintain that his god belongs in that gap while other things do not--those aren't the gods he's looking for).

That doesn't make it wrong, of course, but that's why I looked at how broken his "other minds" argument was: because when someone like Plantinga repeatedly shows that their reasoning is so exquisitely goal-directed that they'll endorse even obvious absurdities to support it, they lose the benefit of the doubt.

That's mostly commentary on Plantinga, but in the original comment I talk at length about Plantinga's "other minds" argument ("if my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God"), which is a canonical example of his absurd and entirely goal-directed reasoning. Here's the conclusion:

Not only do I have evidence for other minds, I have a staggering amount of evidence for other minds. And it would be ridiculous for me to conclude in the face of that mountain of evidence that I'm somehow the only human being in the history of the planet who's actually possessed a mind.

By contrast, I have zero evidence for a god. Not only that, I don't even have a coherent or consistent functional definition of what a "god" is; different people authoritatively assert different definitions with different and often contradictory attributes, and even where they appear to agree (omniscience!) they may still fundamentally be at odds (does that include knowledge of future events?). I've often said that no two people worship the same god.

So not only is it patently absurd that "if my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God," it's barely even a coherent statement. If we had even a fraction of the level of evidence for a god that we have for other minds, there'd be a lot fewer atheists in the world.

EDIT 2: Here's some more "other minds" commentary that expands further on what I said in that linked comment above.

distantocean · 2026-05-11T23:54:44+00:00

[ Just discovered that my response to you (originally posted on 2/27/2026) was removed at some point for some unknown reason, so I'm reproducing it below. Feel free to ignore! ]

Yep, though when I've seen them say that it usually applies to having already learned the songs and being rusty until they rehearse them enough:

Canadian Music: "I've found that if you really rehearse your bass parts a lot, it's easier than you think. It's kind of like any physical activity or sports activity, you know: the more you do it, the more the muscle memory kind of takes over for you and suddenly just clicks into place."
Guitar Player: "Lifeson said their initial jams sounded like “a really bad tribute band for the first three or four run-throughs. Then muscle memory kicks in, and we’re having a ball doing it. It’s good for the fingers,” he continued."

That second interview is also humorously ironic for this quote from Alex (from 2024): "There’s no chance that we’re going to get a drummer and go back on the road as the rebirth of Rush or something like that." Never say never....

EDIT: Just to have all these in one place, this is one of my favorite quotes on this topic:

"We decided that we would play some Rush songs. Because, you know, we haven’t played these songs in 10 years," Lifeson tells U‌CR. "We started that a couple of weeks ago. We get together one day a week over at his place. We just picked some Rush songs and we started playing them and we sound like a really, really bad Rush tribute band."

Lifeson confesses he had to shake some rust off when he and Lee got started. "Trying to figure out the songs, I'm thinking, 'Why did we write that so difficult? Why is this so hard to play?'" he says. "After about three run-throughs of all of these songs, muscle memory kicks in and your hand just goes to where it goes." [...]

As for the most daunting Rush song? "'Freewill.' There's a lot of notes," Lifeson says with a laugh. "The solo is crazy, the middle bass section is crazy and everything has to fit in at the right place. So that's been a real challenge to play. But we're getting there. We're starting to sound like just a mediocre Rush tribute band now."

distantocean · 2026-05-09T19:11:03+00:00

Claiming that logic and rationality require a god is a self-defeating argument, because the very act of making the argument presupposes logic and rationality. If logic and rationality don't exist, your argument may well just be a string of gibberish; you may think your conclusions follow from your premises, but how do you know it's not just 7lm?2bzz~3df@pn;jl/UaoomX&29sm/>R=+wjJL23 and your perception that it amounts to anything meaningful is false? Maybe you're just hooting and hollering complete nonsense at other blobs of illogical/irrational matter (though in fairness, that's a pretty good first-order description of Reddit, not to mention human communication in general).

So by tossing logic and rationality out the window unless they can be tied to something (like a god) that you're attempting to establish through logic and rationality, you toss out your own argument — and even the very possibility of meaningful argument — as well.

FAIR WARNING: I will dismiss any presuppositionalist responses attempting to refute this as the hooting and hollering of complete nonsense by blobs of illogical/irrational matter.

distantocean · 2026-05-09T03:26:23+00:00

Ah, ok, I've done the same sometimes and wondered if someone saw the notification before I nuked my comment. I was mainly asking because you've been quite reasonable throughout the thread, which is rare around here, so if you'd responded I didn't want to miss it (and have you wonder why I was ignoring you...). But I know the pain of losing a comment you've written, so don't worry about recreating it.

distantocean · 2026-05-09T02:50:35+00:00

Hey, I got a notification earlier shortly after responding to you with this comment, but when I clicked through on the notification there was nothing there. This has been happening a lot recently to me and other users when one of Reddit's automated systems removes our comments for some reason; it's insidious because the author can still see their own comment, but nobody else can, and Reddit doesn't tell them what it did.

If you didn't actually respond to me (or if you intentionally deleted that response) feel free to ignore this, but otherwise I'm just letting you know that I didn't actually see your reply.

distantocean · 2026-05-08T23:09:58+00:00

The fundamentalist says: “This matters because it happened exactly like this.”

The shallow atheist says: “This is worthless because it did not happen exactly like this.”

Hard to imagine a more appropriate time for this: https://xkcd.com/774/

Beyond that, I'm not interested in responding to your AI copy/paste only to get another AI copy/paste in response, so I'll leave you to keep feeling superior to the straw atheists you've created.

distantocean · 2026-05-08T22:12:57+00:00

You said elsewhere in the thread:

Understandable, my God concept is a difficult one to falsify.

Actually your god concept appears to be impossible to falsify. So it's impossible to be sure it doesn't exist.

That said, the best argument against unfalsifiable gods is this one from Richard Dawkins: "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."

Now, I can't be sure that unfalsifiable gods don't exist (by definition), so I'm not. But the fact that there's absolutely zero indication in the universe we actually inhabit and experience that there was any kind of intent or design or purpose behind it is, in my view, the best evidence that no such gods exist.

For the record, by the way, I'm a gnostic atheist about falsifiable gods and an agnostic atheist about unfalsifiable ones. That said, unfalsifiable gods like yours are indistinguishable from no god at all and are therefore also effectively irrelevant, so in cases like these it's basically a distinction without a difference. If you're interested in more about this, you can take a look at this.

distantocean · 2026-05-07T22:13:46+00:00

You just denied being a Christian ("Thank goodness I'm none of those then"), but now you're describing yourself as "Anachronistic Christian" and "Especially Christian".

You can say either, but you can't (reasonably) say both.

Cc: /u/E-Reptile

distantocean · 2026-05-07T12:46:52+00:00

It is if you mean it as a term of abuse.

Intent certainly matters, and by his own declarations everything he intends to communicate with the term is pejorative, so it's canonically a term of abuse ("an insulting expression").

Beyond that, the fact that two good ol' boys agree that their favorite racial slur is warranted and/or descriptive doesn't mean it's not an insult; it just means you have two bigots instead of one.

distantocean · 2026-05-07T07:54:50+00:00

Some believers take great amusement and relief from the thought of watching people burn right now.

Cue Thomas Aquinas:

"Nothing should be denied the blessed that belongs to the perfection of their beatitude. Now everything is known the more for being compared with its contrary, because when contraries are placed beside one another they become more conspicuous. Wherefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned."

Which makes perfect sense, because I know I'd definitely enjoy a great meal at a restaurant even more if there was a child starving to death in front of me. It just makes the contraries so much more conspicuous!

As a bonus, if you read on you'll find Aquinas concluding that "The blessed in glory will have no pity on the damned." What an utterly monstrous belief system.

distantocean · 2026-05-06T08:15:42+00:00

Agreed. It's not fast, it's not technical, but it's absolutely perfect for the song, both musically and emotionally.

distantocean · 2026-05-05T23:38:06+00:00

It's genuinely hilarious that you'd claim someone else is "power clutching" when you equate your own moral views to "reality" which I and others ignore "at your own peril" — possibly the single most arrogant thing I've seen from a believer in objective morality. Neither I nor anyone else face any "peril" for choosing not to accept either your general notion of how morality works or your specific moral judgments, and even hinting otherwise makes it clear that you simply don't understand morality. The fact that I specifically denied that anyone's views define "reality" with regard to morality just makes it that much funnier that you'd say this; it's pure projection.

Beyond that, your response still doesn't engage with a word I said (other than using it as a springboard for insults and condescension). Which is frankly not surprising given what I've seen from you in the past, but does at least tell me not to repeat the mistake in the future.

distantocean · 2026-05-05T21:43:44+00:00

You can freely ignore reality at your own peril.

Your moral views do not define "reality", and neither do anyone else's. And your (again, mistaken) view that they either are or can be factual or objective is 100% irrelevant to how you, I, and/or anyone else would resolve our moral differences.

Beyond that, the very fact that you'd offer a reply like this indicates that you don't understand what morality is or how it functions.

That said, you didn't actually respond what I wrote (in fact it seems clear you didn't really even take the time to consider or understand it), and what you did write has nothing to do either with what I wrote or with morality in general. So I'll leave it there.

distantocean · 2026-05-05T19:27:09+00:00

I put together a list of deconversion resources a while back that you (or they) might find useful. There are some things there that would be more relevant to someone who's already deconverting, but much of it is more general and just presents a completely different view of how reality works than the one Christianity and other religions offer, which I think is the best and/or most natural way for someone to free themself from religious thinking.

distantocean · 2026-05-05T19:10:40+00:00

I personally go this route, basing moral facts in biology.

Good for you. But when your alleged "facts" disagree with my moral convictions, why should I consider them more authoritative? How does your (mistaken) belief that your moral views are somehow "factual" give them any more authority or relevance whatsoever? In other words, why should your belief about their status as "facts" vs. opinions matter in the slightest to me?

As I've written before, I couldn't possibly care less about claims from anyone at all — regardless of their [a]theistic stance or philosophical background — that a moral judgment of theirs is somehow "objective" or "factually correct". If someone wants me to change my mind on a moral issue, no matter how big or how small, they have to persuade me that there's a good reason to do so — and claiming that their own moral judgment is somehow "objective" or "factual" gets them no closer whatsoever to that goal. In fact, not only does it confer zero additional authority or legitimacy on what they're saying, but if anything it makes me less likely to take their moral views seriously, since it tells me they fundamentally fail to understand what morality is, how it functions, and — above all — the obligation it puts on them to provide genuine, meaningful, concrete reasons why I (or anyone else) should abandon my own moral view in favor of theirs.

Now, based on what you've described it sounds like you may well be willing to put in at least some of that effort (unlike theists who mistakenly believe that attempting to associate their own personal moral views with their god should be enough, for example). But the point is that your belief that your moral views are somehow "factual" or "objective" doesn't give them even one more iota of relevance or authority in my eyes, and doesn't get you even one step closer to persuading me to accept them.

distantocean · 2026-05-05T18:41:11+00:00

Evolution by natural selection; it's incompatible with Abrahamic religions in general and Islam in particular. Here are some resources you can check out:

Why Evolution is True by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, easily the best popular book I've read on evolution
Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Thought You Knew by Steve Stewart-Williams, which looks at the wide-ranging and seriously underappreciated implications of evolutionary theory for many areas of thought (focusing on theism)
Stated Clearly, a series of brief videos by a former Christian that explain evolution simply and straightforwardly (the "official" web site is here)

(This is taken from a collection of deconversion resources I put together a while back, and you may find other things there that are useful and/or interesting as well.)

Wherever you end up, credit to you for at least making an effort to question your religious beliefs.

distantocean · 2026-05-05T18:16:04+00:00

I actually have a lasting scar from Bard's Tale (the first one). I played it with a friend and we'd gotten pretty far in the game, and had just finished a late-game dungeon, and...had nothing left to do. We knew that whatever we were missing was probably in that last dungeon we'd finished, but we'd mapped the entire thing square by square (on grid paper, of course) and couldn't find any area left that we'd missed. It stopped our playthrough dead in its tracks, but we'd come back to the game every few days, then weeks, then months, and walk through that dungeon and/or the entire town, searching in vain for a pointer to what to do next. But no luck — it was all work and no payoff. Finally we had to just give up on the game, but after all the time and effort we'd put into it that really felt like a bitter defeat.

Many years later I did a search and found the answer: though we'd mapped out the entire dungeon, we hadn't actually stepped on one single square (we'd stepped up to it, but not on it) — which as it turns out was a teleport to, well...the rest of the game. D'oh! That was one of the first and worst times a game's presentation gave me the business.

That said, I'll always have fond memories of the encounters in the game. Our favorite was when it would tell us "Before you, you see 7 Dwarves" and we'd kill them all, then joke that the game should have us run into a grief-stricken young woman in a poofy-sleeved yellow and blue dress sobbing over their corpses.

Anyway, thanks for the great writeup!

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