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The Lie of Christian Morality

Christians love to believe that their religion, and their belief in God more precisely, makes people more moral. Only it doesn't. Instead, it often only fools people into believing that their own selfish desire to avoid hell and win salvation will make them more selfless, and that willingness and ability to obey the command from their master of "love they neighbor," will prove they are worthy of the same. It's just that their "love" often comes with the conviction that one must be cruel to be kind.


People “never commit evil so fully and joyfully,” as Blaise Pascal pointed out, “as when they do it for religious convictions." While the Bible is a story that has helped to produce a growing number of saints, it is also a story of a God rife with bloodlust and hypocrisy, written by mere human beings, and filled with “enough hatred, bigotry, and lust for violence… to satisfy anyone bent on justifying cruelty.  This is why Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:  
 "Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. "
Additionally, the "belief" that Christians can simply be forgiven for whatever human errors they commit in the pursuit of their salvation, overrides any claim that a morality based on a God is superior to one based on pure human empathy. 
A morality based on God only incentivizes those who think they have both the authority and an obligation to impose their own sense of values on everyone else, and for no other reason than that they may win paradise in the next life, for bearing the cross of being the moral authority on everything in this one. 
This is why Christian morality has done nothing to stop pedophile priests on the one hand, and has only encouraged Inquisitions and Crusades on the other. But anyone who brings any of that up about the Christian religion is as liable to be crucified for doing so as Christ for pointing out the hypocrisies of the moral authorities of his own day.



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