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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[origamiscienceguy]

Also, considering a lot of (heavy, fanatic, right-wing) religious people say "I love you, that's why I'm trying to get you (LGBT, black people, immigrants, etc) classed as a lesser person!" I'd say religions definition of love in general is pretty warped.

Yes. We are not perfect. Not by a long shot. Every Christian, me included, have looked down on others. But God always forgives everybody, the only difference between a believer and a non-believer is if they accept the forgiveness.

[Descan]

Aye, that whole "No matter what I do, I'm forgiven by the one who *really* matters!" kind of also warps perspectives and priorities. Automatically cleans your conscience without actually needing to make amends to the harmed party!

[Orange Wizard]

It's just as well, then, that regret is an important part of forgiveness.

[Bohandas]

Also, considering a lot of (heavy, fanatic, right-wing) religious people say "I love you, that's why I'm trying to get you (LGBT, black people, immigrants, etc) classed as a lesser person!" I'd say religions definition of love in general is pretty warped.

Yes, many depictions of the love of God come off as a combonation of the love of a deranged stalker and the love of a highly overbearing, manipulative, and judgemental parent

[Helgoland]

Aye, that whole "No matter what I do, I'm forgiven by the one who *really* matters!" kind of also warps perspectives and priorities. Automatically cleans your conscience without actually needing to make amends to the harmed party!

C'mon, one could easily take similar cheap shots against atheism. I won't, but one could.

[Descan]

* Descan shrug.

That's just something that always skeeved me a little. Just feels like a cop-out, even if one doesn't use it that way. The whole "Hitler is in Heaven as long as he repented, while Ghandi is burning in hell." (Though at least I'm unique and snowflakey enough that I don't want either in Hell, no one deserves that. Even Hitler would burn through 10 million life-times worth of pain and torture, and then it's just cruelty. Hell isn't a punishment, it's just torture, because at least with punishment there's the potential for reform and "Don't do that again!" Hell is eternal, though.)

[Baffler]

Aye, that whole "No matter what I do, I'm forgiven by the one who *really* matters!" kind of also warps perspectives and priorities. Automatically cleans your conscience without actually needing to make amends to the harmed party!

This is the purpose of a penance. You can't be forgiven for something you aren't sorry for after all.

[Arx]

Also, considering a lot of (heavy, fanatic, right-wing) religious people say "I love you, that's why I'm trying to get you (LGBT, black people, immigrants, etc) classed as a lesser person!" I'd say religions definition of love in general is pretty warped.

No, religious people's view is. You said it yourself, but then extrapolated that to all of religion.

I'm actually pretty sure it's impossible to Biblically justify oppression or insults.

[Helgoland]

Not nearly all Christian denominations follow doctrines like that, Descan.  I'm fairly certain that the Catholic Church's position is at least ambiguous:

The just of the Earth, even those who do not know Christ and his Church, but who under the influence of grace seek God in a sincere heart, are called to build the Kingdom of God, collaborating with the Lord, who is its first and supreme architect.

And any good Christian would not want Hitler to go to hell. Wishing eternal torment on someone - on anyone - is a very un-Christian sentiment.

[Descan]

That was a typo, I did mean religious instead of religion.

And I'm not saying Christians want that. If anything, I'm saying God's kind of a jerk for doing it/letting it happen.

As for penance, that may not be how it's supposed to work, but it's completely possible for someone to work under the impression it does. They won't find out for sure until the end, after all.

[Angle]

The big problem, in my mind, is with faith, which in my experience is basically just a excuse to believe whatever you want. Now sometimes this is used to support nice things - Charity, Generosity, Humility, etc, but more often in my experiance is used to support some rather nasty behaviours - Hatred, Superiority, Hierarchy, Cruelty, etc.

[Ghills]

* Descan shrug.

That's just something that always skeeved me a little. Just feels like a cop-out, even if one doesn't use it that way. The whole "Hitler is in Heaven as long as he repented, while Ghandi is burning in hell."

Wait, what?  That line of reasoning is a new one to me.

I think LDS theology is pretty unique among Christian beliefs though.  It's much more about people being able to choose who they want to be.

We believe that after this life, everyone gets a chance to be taught the Gospel by believers and angels and repent.   After that comes Judgement Day, when people are sorted into 3 degrees of glory. Basically people who want to be like God, people who were good but don't want to be like God ('honorable but blinded by the craftiness of men', etc), and people who were not good.  Every one of those groups gets some amount of glory, just less or more depending on which group. 

Outer darkness/hell is reserved for the devil and people who deliberately and knowingly choose to follow him, which is very difficult to qualify for (ex, assassinating someone for personal gain while holding the Priesthood).  Eternal torment is the torment of seeing everyone else have glory while you don't, knowing that you messed up, being unrelentingly awful and having to live with unrelentingly awful people. It's endless not as a deliberate punishment so much as natural consequence of choosing to be vile and then being stuck that way.

https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/76

[Ghills]

That was a typo, I did mean religious instead of religion.

And I'm not saying Christians want that. If anything, I'm saying God's kind of a jerk for doing it/letting it happen.

As for penance, that may not be how it's supposed to work, but it's completely possible for someone to work under the impression it does. They won't find out for sure until the end, after all.

I guess I can kind of see that reasoning, but it relies on an axiom that isn't doctrine (i.e. God should micromanage everything to make it comfortable/happy/the way I want it). The Bible is pretty clear that God's goal is not to make things the way we think they should be.

LDS theology is that the purpose of this life is for people to learn, grow, and make choices...which includes the possibility of making the wrong choice. God mindcontrolling everyone would utterly thwart the purpose of life, because people don't learn and grow when they're forced into one single choice (in fact, trying to remove free will was one of Satan's big sins, along with trying to usurp God's authority and leading a rebellion).

As for people not understanding the point of repentance, well, there's always some people who only hear what they want to hear.  LDS doctrine has a clear repentance process (have faith, acknowledge and be sorry for sin, stop doing it, confess to God and those harmed, make restitution) instead of penance, but even after hearing it repeatedly people have trouble with it.  Actually changing is hard and some people have a very hard time with it. 

[Ghills]

The big problem, in my mind, is with faith, which in my experience is basically just a excuse to believe whatever you want. Now sometimes this is used to support nice things - Charity, Generosity, Humility, etc, but more often in my experiance is used to support some rather nasty behaviours - Hatred, Superiority, Hierarchy, Cruelty, etc.

That's not faith. That's people justifying whatever they want to do because they want to do it - any reason works for that.  All political ideologies have been used that way.  Atheism has been used to justify its own share of incredible atrocities.   

The problem isn't whatever principle people are using to justify their sins. The problem is that people will use anything to justify what they want to do so they don't feel bad about doing things that are wrong.

[Rolan7]

But good Christians follow, or try to follow, the word of God.  So their actions do reflect on God to some degree.  Of course people make mistakes, but currently Christians as a group are the main source of intolerance.  The Moral Majority movement was inherently Christian.

Now, of course there are millions of Christians who loudly condemn this intolerance - but two things.  One, the Bible really does condemn homosexuality in a few places (not just Leviticus).  Two...  While yes, God can't be expected to fix every little thing, this isn't little.  This is millions of people uniting, *in his name, and their shared faith*, to promote intolerance.  If these people have accepted his guiding influence into their lives, how could let such powerful movements form?

Either he's okay with it, or he's not actually guiding them.  Maybe because they're of the wrong denomination, I guess.