and I keep coming back to "what specific behaviours did jesus encourage that weren't thought good behaviours previously?" If people are going to claim that ethical/moral behaviour is a result of religion, they should at least be able to point to changes in behaviour religion caused.
It would also help if those behaviors could not possibly be caused by anything else other than religion.
if someone asks for your jacket, give him your coat. i'll maintain this view regardless of your opinion of it: following Jesus isn't a religion. it's a relationship with a person who said he was God incarnate, and those following him in his day accepted/agreed with his claim. if you're following Jesus and someone asks for your jacket, you give him your coat. IOW, you make sure the person's need is met, not the way you see the need, but the way someone who was free to make whatever sacrifice would be necessary to meet the need would see it.
when you are free to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to meet whatever need is presented to you, let me know where that comes from. my guess is that you will have to train yourself to behave that way, over a period of time. Jesus' followers spent three years with him, and it took his death, resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit to evoke the changes required.
So people didn't respond generously to requests for help before Jesus suggested it? And only those who follow Jesus act that way? Christianity is a religion, no more, no less. It's just that as it's your religion, you take every aspect of it as 100% fact, while dismissing the teaching of all the others.
here's the problem: you don't think you need to act that way, and you don't think you need to act that way because nobody is telling you to. you hear no voice telling you to make sacrifices to meet the needs of people whom you don't like. your questions do one thing. they try to disqualify from any application to your particular life what Jesus taught. what teaching am i dismissing?
You've completely ignored my question. No they don't. You've essentially said christians strive to be generous because jesus said they should be. That in no way equates to generosity being founded in christianity, or that if non-christians think generosity is good, they have no basis on which to found that claim. Well, other religions claiming jesus isn't the son of god, for a start. You don't consider it important to pray to allah five times a day. You don't consider it important to never cut your hair and keep it covered by a turban. You don't offer up sweets as an offering to ganesh. You don't practice meditation to attempt to reach nirvana.
i don't hear voices, and if you want to call what my experience is "hearing voices", then you hear voices, also. i can't know where the voices you hear come from. and btw, it's such a gift to be the subject of your disdain.
i didn't ignore your question. your question was rhetorical. one of your posts said that i see everything thru the lens of my Christian faith so i believe my perspective and the responses that issue from that perspective to be correct. tell me how your responses differ from mine as to the relation to your specific perspective. would you agree that you think your perspective is correct and you believe your responses are consistent with the "facts" as you accept them to be true? no. this is what i'm saying: nobody is normally as generous as the model presented by Jesus. sometimes you are that generous and sometimes i am, but the normal way we operate is selfish. it requires training to behave otherwise. and to be willing and free to make the sacrifices that Jesus is describing will never come without a specific commitment. jesus is the son of god or he isn't. if he is the son of god then any other teaching is untrue. if you don't dismiss things that are untrue, that's your business. me, i try to discern the truth and then adhere to it.
It wasn't. In a thread asking how secular morals can have any foundation because they don't come from religion, it's not rhetorical at all. Unless you believe those morals/ethics came about because of religion, the premise of the opening post is bollocks. That's kind of on topic, I'd suggest. I don't think that was me, but the point wasn't that you believe your beliefs to be true, but that you regard your beliefs as the default position and assume not believing to be a rejection of those beliefs. Do you believe christianity has made christians more generous than other people? The problem is that your mental trip to discern the truth went no further than "jesus is the son of god because the bible says so"
you're wrong here, and i can't convince you because your mind is closed. i don't know whether you think i'm stupid or incapable of reasoning things out or ignorant or whatnot. but there's so much more to coming to the conclusion that Jesus is the son of god than "because the bible says so". i don't know whether you've been paying attention to Dignan, but many of his posts account for the process through which most Christians of my acquaintance come to the conclusion that Jesus is who he claimed to be. do we believe that the biblical account is true? yes. but there's more to it than that. what factors into the equation for me and for most of the people i know who are Christians -- clearly i can't speak for anyone else -- is what happened in the weeks after his death and then the years following, up to and including the deaths of the Apostles. i don't know anyone who was there, so i can't ask any questions, but you weren't there either, so you can only question the reliability of the testimony of the persons who were there and what is recorded in the historical annals. i'm persuaded -- no, convinced -- that a broad, life-changing event took place during that period that the world now recognizes as the Christian Movement. what is significant is that it is singularly the way of life that is outwardly focused, rather than inwardly focused. the emphasis is not on avoiding bad behavior but pursuing the best model of self-sacrificing good behavior ever described. it's counter-intuitive at its core. it's not really about morality or a set of behaviors to practice. rather the Christian way ( referred to as The Way early on ) is concerned with becoming like Jesus by training self and others to behave as he did. i don't know anyone who has raised anyone from death, but i have several friends who have witnessed first hand spontaneous healing, including a woman who had a tumor in her brain on Monday and Tuesday it was gone. the doctors treating her were convinced that there was no mistake made in the original diagnosis. they have no way to account for the change. now, in balance, among our church-goers is a family of 4 who once were 5. the 6 year old girl died from a brain tumor. i don't think that the prayers in these two cases were markedly different. why did the one die and not the other? frankly, i don't know. i feel sad that the little girl and her family didn't have the experience of years together. i believe that she's pain-free now, and, it should be noted, that during her treatment she didn't have many, many of the anticipated side-effects. she more or less sailed thru chemo and radiation, had a few months more and died, apparently peacefully. sad, yes. but the thing is that thousands and thousands of people across the world rallied together to pray for her and honor her life, such as it was. she changed the spiritual profile of our church. we went from a bunch of people attending the same church to being more like a family.
didn't one occur 600 years later in Saudi Arabia? And unlike Jesus he had hundreds of thousands of followers by the time he died, having converted the whole Arabian peninsula. So why no such imbrace of Islam?
Because I can literally go to Mohammed's tomb. He is dead, and there is nothing particularly particular or special about Islam. It is like every other religion, do good stuff = get reward. Christianity is dialectically opposed to this narrative, and is very, very different from Islam and most world religions, so much so, I have a hard time believing that someone came up with it either purposefully or by accident.
Then go somewhere else and don't post on the "Sprituality and Religion" forum. Since you believe in neither spirituality nor religion it seems ironic to me that you would complain about people posting their spiritual and religious beliefs on the "Spirituality and Religion" forum. Just saying....