Something that pisses off non-Christians, is the Christian POV that a spiritual person who’s honest with themselves really can’t be an unwitting pawn of Satan/evil/sin/whathaveyou. It’s always a conscious choice.
As a non-believer my answer to this was “Ok, I’ve violated the miss/mr perfect rules of your little club. So who cares?”
But the rules are intended to be “universal” in its largest sense, not just the purview of one group. The misconception is that by rejecting the “little club” you can reject all the rules, too. Saying “I’m not a Christian” doesn’t release one from the task of figuring out what’s morally right.
No question, TheeGrumpy, the example “If God told you to kill somebody, would you do it?” is related to the OP. It’s as much as saying “If God told you to do something he told you not to do . . .” Uh . . .
Like most paradox, this relies on not defining the terms carefully. If God told you to do something (at one point, as far as you could understand), and then later told you to do something else, which should you do? The resolution is the same as the OP – in the end it’s always down to a personal choice between right and wrong. This makes the story of God telling Abraham to kill his son doubly interesting . . . God says not to kill, but he tells Abraham to kill . . . hmmm . . . what would I do? You don’t have to be a Jew/Christian/Muslim to appreciate the dilemma.
Actually, I’ve noticed that oftentimes fundamentalists show an inability to understand even the very concept of a hypothetical question. More generally, many fundamentalists show a general inability to deal with any kind of non-literalism or “what if” situation.
Look, for example, to the recent Pit thread in which someone said that a FC seemed to have the attitude that every knee will bend to Christ, because the FC was ready with a baseball bat just in case they didn’t bend fast enough. The FC replied that that’s ludicrous, because she would never physically harm anyone.
Or take FC’s who are against gay marriage because the Bible says so. I often ask them how they would feel if Jews had a majority in Congress and outlawed pork, and a surprising number of the FC’s will reply, “That’s a stupid question. Jews will never become powerful enough in America to do that kind of thing.” When I told them that it’s a hypothetical question, they insisted that there’s no point in asking questions about situations that will never happen.
More broadly, I’ve seen several cases where FC’s just can’t put themselves in the other guy’s shoes. Perhaps the most obvious examples are the typical FC attempts at proselytization: “The Bible is infallible- it says so right here!” “You don’t believe in God? Then how do you expect to wash away your sins?” There are also the condescending “compliments” FC’s sometimes give out, like “I’m no bigot- I think you’re a very moral person, for an atheist.”
I remember one striking example in which an FC tried to convert an atheist by quoting the Bible. A liberal Christian told the FC that that won’t work, because a) the atheist believes that the Bible is just another book, and b) the Bible itself says that the FC’s approach is all wrong, in such-and-such verse. The FC shot back that the liberal Christian’s argument was contradictory. If the Bible is just another book, then how can the LC quote it in order to prove that the FC is doing the wrong thing?
I’ve said before that the whole situation reminds me of the Junior Mints test for autism. You show an autistic child a box of Junior Mints and ask them what’s inside. Naturally, they say “Junior Mints.” Then you open the box and show them that there’s really a pencil inside, and close it again. Then you ask, “If your friend Billy came in here and I asked him what was in the box, what would he say?” A healthy child will say, “Junior Mints.” An autistic child will say, “A pencil.”
One can debate which way the cause-and-effect goes. I honestly don’t know, but it’s worth pointing out that if for some reason you can’t put yourself in other people’s shoes, you’re going to have a hard time getting along with other people unless you’re in a very conformist culture. If everyone thinks alike, there’s no need to figure out what the other guy is thinking. Hence the fundamentalists who will blast away at gays, Mormons, atheists, etc. and then, when their targets get angry, declare, “Well, I never have any problem getting along with my fundamentalist friends, so clearly this nasty situation isn’t my fault. It must be that you can’t get along with a real Christian.”
Where is SATAN when you need him? Actually, the Devil (according to what I read) has lost his power-ever since he attempted the temptation of Christ ("…get the behind me, Satan!"). Any actual physical power that he may have had over mankind vanished on that day.
I believe that most evil comes from humans themselves, not from the fallen angel known as satan.