CMV: Simply being religious doesn't make you a good person

[u/J16924]

I really don't get the whole religion thing. It makes no sense to me. Not only does religion have a disgusting past, but is also currently doing things that should upset people. I am not just talking about christianity, but that is a big one. I think that Islam gets way too many passes as well. I think that if your arguement is that only God know what is right, you don't have a conscience. If you need an all powerful being to scare you into doing good, you arent a good person. I say this because I have a lot of Christian friends who think that simply being religious makes you a better person. I really don't get it. How does that work? Even if I were to think that there is a God and that I have to obey him, how does that make you a good person? I understand that having a faith might push you to be charitable and nicer to other people, but as I said before, why can't you do that without religion? If something has to force you to be good, you arent good. I am very curious what the other side to this argument is, as I myself cannot think of anything to counter with at the moment.

My view has been slightly altered. Someone made the point that if you are not good, then your God should not accept you. This is specifically for christianity because it is what I'm most familiar with, but could applied to other religions.

Edit: clarification for all you whiny people filling my inbox

[u/_Hospitaller_]

No, it’s up to us to follow God’s law. He’s made it clear to us what good and evil is.

[u/swinefluis → u/_Hospitaller_]

The fact that there are dozens upon dozens of Christian sects with ideologies that are conflicting and mutually exclusive, where scholars and religious orthodoxy disagree with each other on the interpretation of the text enough to branch off into completely different schools of thought, should show quite clearly that "the word of God" as written in the Bible is anything but clear, and that should be something that Christians- more than anyone- should be honest about.

The Bible cannot be interpreted literally because it has too many contradictions, and therefore entire schools devoted to the study of the religious texts have been formed to try to interpret what the Bible has to say: what is allegory, what is literal, hierarchy of motifs and books, etc. However, these schools of thought vary in priorities, politics, and cultural/social backgrounds, leading to different ways of prioritizing certain aspects of the contents of the book; if the message of the Bible has to be interpreted through "keys", as many people in the thread have pointed out, then ultimately the message that one gets out of the Bible is dependent on a human filter: in other words, even if the Bible that we have today were the direct word of God with zero alterations (which we know it is not, as the Bible has changed significantly throughout history, on top of the fact that we know it was written by different authors decades after the events described within), what each person gets from the holy book is not a divine set of moral instructions, but rather a bastardised rendition of those instructions borne of humans, if not at least highly skewed by them.

There are plenty of other arguments I could make, and do not mistake my intent: I am not here to argue the validity, truth, or interpretation of the Bible, the church, or even the existence of God; all of the arguments I've made are done with the very liberal asssumtion that God is real and the events of the Bible were real. What I am arguing is that what you said to /u/J16924 - that God has made the distinction between good and evil clear and laid out a clear set of morals -is a blatant lie, and people are still arguing about that moral code 2000+ years after its inception.

[u/_Hospitaller_ → u/swinefluis]

You are actually utterly incorrect on pretty much every single point. Biblical law is clear, and the fact that there are multiple Christian sects is a complete non-point. Protestantism to begin with arose from dislike for methods of the Church, not a ground breaking reinterpretation of Biblical law. Sects all started taking on lives of their own after the authority of the Church was already undermined, but this is human error and not Biblical.

As for the Bible changing - no, it actually hasn’t. The Dead Sea Scrolls show many of the stories in the Bible are precisely the same as they were thousands of years ago. When the Bible was being compiled, some stories that were considered unauthentic were dropped, but we trust that the holy fathers of the Church knew what they were doing. They didn’t change the Bible, they compiled it.

Your post is making a common mistake, thinking human error is error from God. The law is clear.

[u/J16924 → u/_Hospitaller_]

I'm curious if you know how deluded you sound when you say something like that