Talk to your doctor, they could help, as it could be allergies.
Is your wife under a great deal of stress lately? My wife got stress hives while she was in medical school and still gets them occasionally. They seem a lot like bug bites.
She hasn't been under more stress than usual, though she did decide to take some benadryl last night since nothing else was helping much and it did seem effective. So yeah, maybe it's allergies. She'll have a doctor's appointment soon and we can ask him if it's still happening. Thanks.
IDK if anyone would have any idea about this, but figured it's worth a shot...
My wife is suffering from bug bites. Every day it seems she gets a few more. They behave basically like mosquito bites and are really itchy.
Now, the strange part: I have no idea what bugs could actually be biting her. My wife rarely leaves the house and in fact spends the majority of each day in bed due to chronic health problems. Of course I share the same bed with her and have not been bitten at all. So that would seem to rule out bedbugs. In fact, neither me nor my kids have had any problems with bug bites. I've not seen a single mosquito anywhere in the house, or really any bug at all aside from the occasional ant; and after leaving out ant poison I haven't seen any of them for a week or so.
BTW, I live in Wisconsin. So, any idea what sort of (apparently invisible and highly discriminating) bugs could be doing the biting?
Does "etc." include "be pretty okay with slavery"?
If the only alternative is to resist it with violence, yes; but that's a false dichotomy. Early Christians affirmed the worth of every person in God's eyes while accepting that slavery was an entrenched part of the society in which they lived, a society that (according to their eschatological expectations) would soon be swept away. They were more concerned with spiritual than political abolitionism. But they made it clear that slavery was incompatible with the God's vision for a beatified humanity. The brief letter to Philemon is a good example of this.
Even the New Testament, the "good" testament, has a theological thesis that revolves around the concepts of blood debt and human sacrifice. These themes may have had appeal to the sort of society that enjoyed watching condemned men kill each other on the sands of the arena. But we do know better now. And modern Christians have to engage in some serious cognitive dissonance to reconcile their 21st-Century sensibilities with the Bronze Age mores they claim to be guided by.
Setting aside the theological underpinnings for the moment, would you agree that most people think that Jesus's moral teachings are still exemplary by modern standards? You know, the Golden Rule, love your enemies, do not repay evil for evil but overcome evil with good, do not be proud but associate with the lowly, etc.?
Highroller, let's take a step back from the whole "dysfunctional family" paradigm and approach the question more generally. It seems to me that you are saying a person cannot be acting morally in doing [X], no matter how ostensibly good [X] appears to be, if he is lying about his motives. Would you agree with that?
No, because the husband is doing [X] out of entirely selfish reasons that harm his family.
What part about "let's take a step back from the whole dysfunctional family paradigm" did you not understand and/or deliberately ignore?
This is what I mean by "mental gymnastics," Pandas. You can't accept a truth because it's threatening to you, and so you go into denial, and thus twist around your thoughts to make the conclusion you want come out. The arguments don't make sense, but of course they don't, because you're not trying to have a logical argument, you're trying to avoid accepting the truth any way that you can.
Your armchair psychoanalysis is out of line. I'm willing to have this conversation be impersonal, as it ought to be in a debate forum -- not about me and not about you. Please try to honor that. If you think my reasoning is confused, you can call it confused without needing to insinuate that I feel threatened by the truth.
Look at what you're arguing. You're trying to argue that the husband in this relationship is behaving out of love because "love" to you means, "really wanting to leave his wife but not doing so only because he's terrified that he'll face torture if he does."
Absolutely untrue. Love does mean sometimes doing things you don't want to do, or even really fear or detest doing, for the sake of another. It means honoring commitments even when it no longer feels good to do so. And yes, it means being honest with the beloved; and some other things besides. Now, who do you know that has ever loved another perfectly? Who, moreover, loves in such a way that love is not at least a little commingled with fear? If a man wanted to honor his commitment to his family, and didn't want to hurt their feelings by expressing his dissatisfaction with things, and was afraid of divine censure if he failed but respected God enough to believe that such censure would be justified -- how could you say that man had not love?
Then how can you insist that people not dismiss the Bible?
I should've said, "ought not treat the Bible dismissively." I mean, if you're convinced by the arguments for pantheism generally and therefore believe that no monotheism can be true, it's fine to say, "I don't need to hear what the Bible says about God" unless or until someone undermines your faith in pantheism. But that doesn't mean you should say, "Oh, the Bible, what a stupid book written by ignorant people, total waste of time." I think it's right to treat holy scriptures with a modicum of respect -- or at least to refrain from open disdain -- simply out of consideration for the millions of people who do believe; and in the acknowledgment that no such scripture could've attained its stature by being stupid and antisocial and evil on the face of it.
I'm guessing then that you don't consider eternal torture to count as infinitely merciful and infinitely kind and infinitely loving then.
No. Torture in the active sense is done either for coercion or to satisfy a sadistic desire, neither of which squares with God's character. But someone can experience something as "being torturous" even if it is something they've engaged of their own free will, with no one forcing it upon them. In that case ignorance and especially willful ignorance will often play a factor; and I suspect hell is a place where willful ignorance is quite widespread, particularly in the form of lacking empathy.
Highroller, let's take a step back from the whole "dysfunctional family" paradigm and approach the question more generally. It seems to me that you are saying a person cannot be acting morally in doing [X], no matter how ostensibly good [X] appears to be, if he is lying about his motives. Would you agree with that?
Quote from Highroller » »
Actually, your statement is both those things.
How? It's just semantics!
I'll pose it yet another way. Suppose an art teacher tells her students, "I know you don't all have the same artistic ability; that's not what I'm grading you on. I just want to see your best effort. If I can see that you've put time and care into your work, that'll get you a good grade." So she is affirming that there is a distinction between hard work and careless work, between diligence and laziness. But the proof -- not even of the distinction, but of the affirmation -- must be seen in the grades she gives.
If student 1 spends hours creating a very elaborate picture, and student 2 smears a single brown line of paint across the canvas and calls it done, and the teacher gives both of them A's, she has very clearly demonstrated that she sees no difference between effort and sloth. So her affirmation is a lie. How is this any different from a God who affirms a distinction between good and evil, yet treats all deeds and all lives equally?
I have to wonder, if eternal torture doesn't qualify as not-loving, not-compassionate or not-merciful... What possibly could qualify as not-loving or not-compassionate or not-merciful to those people being tortured forever?
Can we allow that maybe "torture" is not the right word here? That perhaps hell is not hell from the view of the damned, but from the view of heaven? That possibly the inhabitants of hell are "kind of okay," with their circumstances, just as they were "kind of okay" creeping through life hurting, robbing, mocking and killing their fellow people?
And I feel this is a leap backwards when your trying to look critically at what is said and move forwards with it. If we thought Newton was an aspect of the Creator, then the work he did on alchemy would have a different connotation. In that case, Newton might have held science back as much--if not more--then he brought it forward.
If all I were to do was to look critically and continually at everything, I would just go through life spinning my wheels. At some point one must take a leap of faith (though the distance of the chasm leapt may vary) and commit to something. From all that I've looked at, Christianity appears (whereby, I admit, "appearance" includes both intellectual and emotional appeals) the nearest to the truth.
What is your opinion on the Völuspá, the Iliad, the Qur'an, the Kitáb i-Aqdas, the Mahabharata, the Lotus Sutra, the Tao Te Ching, the Popol Vuh, the Book of Mormon, and Dianetics?
Obviously all these things are found to be wise and valuable and even divine to a large number of people. But I don't need to carefully examine each and every one of them. Every religion asserts, at its base, one of three possible schematics: only the universe exists; only God exists; or both God and the universe exist. If I have concluded that the third schematic is the true one, then I can easily dismiss (not as useless or uninteresting or immoral, but as ultimately untrue) the majority of religions and worldviews. I am left to consider the arguments for and against Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, deism, and just a handful of other beliefs. Having done so, I find Christianity the most compelling.
By any sensible metric, our society is getting more peaceful. Violent crime is down, wars are less frequent and less bloody.
Why is it then that mass shootings in America have become so common that they no longer shock us? That all the anti-bullying campaigns have not made a dent in the practice of young people employing social media to harass one another to the point of suicide? That our political system is so deadlocked by ideologues that cooperation in Congress is seen about as frequently as Bigfoot?
It sounds like you're saying, in a nutshell, that a moral nihilist only cares about truth when it is to his advantage to do so.
But in that case he must have some convictions -- must hold certain beliefs as true -- about what constitutes his advantage. So he actually cares about truth pretty much all the time, just like the rest of us.
This does not make any sense. If hell is self-imposed, then how can God threaten hell?
A threat doesn't have to involve action on the part of one making it; it can simply be a declaration of cause and effect (although in that case we might prefer to call it a "warning" rather than a "threat.") God can warn sinners of hell just as a doctor can warn morbidly obese patients of an impending heart attack, though the dietary and lifestyle choices that lead to morbid obesity are self-imposed.
And if God does not threaten hell, and you don't want to go to hell, then can't you just say, "I don't want to go to hell," and you won't be in it? You said that hell is something God apparently gives reluctantly to those who actively seek it, right? Didn't you say something along the lines of "God gives people what they want"? But you don't actively seek it. In fact, you seem pretty scared of it. So, doesn't that mean you won't go to hell by the parameters established?
It was not ever my intent to say that God gives people what they want, but rather that He gives them what they choose. And of course there is a world of difference between wanting and choosing. An alcoholic could dearly want to stop drinking even as he chooses to drink. A compulsive gambler wants a lot of money and yet makes choices that impoverish her. And people could want heaven while routinely make choices that point them towards hell.
As I said, if you have provided an accurate statement of your opinions of your wife and children, then you cannot possibly be said to behave in a loving manner toward them, because the only reason you're there is because you're forced to be there. You are in their lives solely because you feel your own safety is threatened. Your concern is exclusively on yourself, not on them. We see this in your repeated assertions that you would gladly leave them at a moment's notice were the threat of hell not present.
That was not accurate, and I regret bringing it up. Even if it were accurate, I forgot that in debate one ought always to pose actuals as hypotheticals; I've been very out of practice.
And this is morally wrong because it involves you behaving in a manner that is entirely self-serving, while being contrary to the best interests of anyone else.
Now then, considering a hypothetical man who really does despise his family, yet stays with them out of fear of punishment, and does so in such a way that they suspect his true feelings only obliquely, if at all -- how is that contrary to their interests? He is providing for them; they would not have his provision if he left. His presence creates stability; his departure could throw things into chaos. Do you not suppose that the wife and children would adamantly maintain that it is in their best interests to have a husband and father, even if he acts sometimes melancholy and agitated, than to not have one at all?
Do you believe that morality is or ought to be devoid of any utilitarian considerations?
Likewise, were we to believe that God is indeed threatening you with hell and torment or whatever, then God is also morally wrong for behaving in a manner that is entirely self-serving, while being contrary to the best interests of anyone else.
It could very much be to the best interests of those in heaven to not have unrepentant murderers, pedophiles, drug dealers, gangbangers and other scoundrels running loose among them, trying to perpetuate their disastrous life choices out into eternity.
By affirming the difference between right and wrong. That is to say, by stating or asserting that there is a difference between right and wrong. Which is what "affirming" means.
I can hold up two crayons of the exact same color, one labeled "purple" and the other labeled "violet," and affirm that there is a difference between purple and violet. That doesn't make my statement true or meaningful.
Let me see if I do understand your position correctly:
You've posted that (A) God would want someone to stay in a loveless relationship in which a person despises his wife and children and would leave them gladly in a moment's notice; (B) that God would punish that person with eternal hellfire if he did not stay in this relationship; and (C) that any of this is morally acceptable for either God or that person.
(A) God would often have us do things that are unpleasant or even excruciating (see: the crucifixion) out of love; for love is not merely a blissful emotional state. That would be better called infatuation or lust. If a person has made a commitment to a relationship, especially to the extent that he has allowed others to become dependent on him for their well-being, then he ought to, out of love, see that relationship through. For love encompasses duty and self-sacrifice and all manner of things that do not feel good. (I never said that I was in a "loveless" marriage, and certainly not that I "despise" my family -- only that my marriage has been often emotionally taxing and disappointing; and you seem to have conflated emotional disappointment with an absence of love. But the two can and often do coexist.)
(B) I do not believe that hell is a literal place of fire. I have stated that quite clearly. I do believe that if a person makes a habit of seeking separation from his fellow humans, especially those to whom he is beholden (like family and friends), for the sake of expedience or emotional gratification, that such behavior may dispose his soul to seek separation even from God.
(C) If you are a better arbiter or interpreter than me as to what constitutes morality, please produce for me a measuring device so that I can see where I fall short.
Quote from Highroller »
I have stated outright that the lack of a hell does not mean a moral vacuum, and do believe that God affirms the difference between right and wrong.
How does God affirm the difference between right and wrong? That's what you keep dancing around. For if there really is a difference, then different consequences must follow.
The way I read it, you have life set up like a flag football game for six year-olds. Good deeds are touchdowns and evil deeds are fumbles. But since we're dealing with six year-olds and we don't want to hurt their self-esteem, no one bothers keeping score and in the end everyone wins. Even if you fumble all the time and it becomes a frustration to your teammates, and even to you -- in the end, God overrules all frustration with the affirmation that YOU ARE A WINNER!
So, again, how does God affirm the difference between right and wrong?
Also, I admit that I have been getting overly emotionally invested in this discussion. I apologize for that.
Highroller, I'm just going to post your responses to me from one of the earlier pages in this thread (it was post 107).
Quote from Highroller » »
So if I understand this correctly, when you think of someone who wouldn't torture their child for an eternity, your first thought is, "Pfft, what a helicopter parent?"
You love those false dichotomies don't you?
So you want people to suffer infinite agony for all of eternity.
Now do you see if you had just freaking admitted that, we could have saved two pages worth of denial from you?
Well, yes. Because you're advocating something morally unconscionable and being hypocritical on top of it. Were you expecting applause?
Well, you could not want people to suffer. That's entirely doable. It's called loving and forgiving people.
Or at least not being a dick.
Words straight out of your mouth: I love false dichotomies, I want people to suffer, I'm in denial, I'm morally unconscionable, I'm hypocritical -- and I'm a dick.
Oh, and yet I'm the one who's making this personal?
And you're still evading! You still will not directly (or even indirectly!) answer the question I repeated, for at least the third time, in my reply to Bitsy! Why don't you man up and do that, Highroller, instead of typing another mini-essay about everything that's wrong with me?
Highroller is just using the dialectical process to increase his understanding of you and your position.
Hardly. He presumes to understand my position fully and loudly condemns it.
He hasn't actually insulted you or demeaned you
Really? Then why have I felt no discourtesy or hostility from Crashing00, or Tiax, or any of the other atheists who have responded in this thread, but only from a Christian?
Highroller wants to know why the idea of punishment of sin is so important to Pandas' and such a large concept in his mind and Pandas' has yet to really answer that question.
And Highroller has yet to answer how the idea of God treating Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa exactly the same in the afterlife could possibly be an expression of love (never mind justice); for to render them equivalent is to state that all their acts in this life, everything they invested in building a self-definition, does not actually matter -- and so God mocks or makes a joke of the central aspect of humanity, which He Himself has invested us with.
And do you believe God would justify you committing harm to people out of pure selfishness?
Why are you still twisting words? Do you delight in portraying me in the worst possible way?
For in the first case you said that it was me trying to justify my self (that is, my essence, my being-ness); and I said, no, it is God who justifies -- again referring to the self. And now you turn it around to imply that I think God would justify my wrong actions, as if He would make evil be good for my sake, which is absurd. But we receive justification apart from our actions, whether wrong or right. "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith -- and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God -- not by works, so that no one can boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9)
As plain as that is, why do you keep trying to trip me up with your rhetorical tricks? What have I done to make you hate me?
No, this doesn't have anything to do with God or religion. It has to do with you. This has to do with your need to justify yourself.
And the answer is no. Of course you're not morally justified.
Exactly. I'm not justified. I can't justify myself. It is God who justifies.
All of this is, of course, completely irrelevant to the discussion. This should not be a discussion about anyone's personal life. This is supposed to be a discussion about Christianity.
If Christianity had no bearing on peoples' personal lives, it wouldn't be worth discussing.
Now can we please get back to a discussion on how it is irreconcilable that God can be loving and forgiving and still damn people to hell? Can we get back to a discussion on God, and not Pandas? That'd be great.
She hasn't been under more stress than usual, though she did decide to take some benadryl last night since nothing else was helping much and it did seem effective. So yeah, maybe it's allergies. She'll have a doctor's appointment soon and we can ask him if it's still happening. Thanks.
My wife is suffering from bug bites. Every day it seems she gets a few more. They behave basically like mosquito bites and are really itchy.
Now, the strange part: I have no idea what bugs could actually be biting her. My wife rarely leaves the house and in fact spends the majority of each day in bed due to chronic health problems. Of course I share the same bed with her and have not been bitten at all. So that would seem to rule out bedbugs. In fact, neither me nor my kids have had any problems with bug bites. I've not seen a single mosquito anywhere in the house, or really any bug at all aside from the occasional ant; and after leaving out ant poison I haven't seen any of them for a week or so.
BTW, I live in Wisconsin. So, any idea what sort of (apparently invisible and highly discriminating) bugs could be doing the biting?
Your armchair psychoanalysis is out of line. I'm willing to have this conversation be impersonal, as it ought to be in a debate forum -- not about me and not about you. Please try to honor that. If you think my reasoning is confused, you can call it confused without needing to insinuate that I feel threatened by the truth.
Absolutely untrue. Love does mean sometimes doing things you don't want to do, or even really fear or detest doing, for the sake of another. It means honoring commitments even when it no longer feels good to do so. And yes, it means being honest with the beloved; and some other things besides. Now, who do you know that has ever loved another perfectly? Who, moreover, loves in such a way that love is not at least a little commingled with fear? If a man wanted to honor his commitment to his family, and didn't want to hurt their feelings by expressing his dissatisfaction with things, and was afraid of divine censure if he failed but respected God enough to believe that such censure would be justified -- how could you say that man had not love?
Flawed love, yes; but so have we all.
I should've said, "ought not treat the Bible dismissively." I mean, if you're convinced by the arguments for pantheism generally and therefore believe that no monotheism can be true, it's fine to say, "I don't need to hear what the Bible says about God" unless or until someone undermines your faith in pantheism. But that doesn't mean you should say, "Oh, the Bible, what a stupid book written by ignorant people, total waste of time." I think it's right to treat holy scriptures with a modicum of respect -- or at least to refrain from open disdain -- simply out of consideration for the millions of people who do believe; and in the acknowledgment that no such scripture could've attained its stature by being stupid and antisocial and evil on the face of it.
How? It's just semantics!
I'll pose it yet another way. Suppose an art teacher tells her students, "I know you don't all have the same artistic ability; that's not what I'm grading you on. I just want to see your best effort. If I can see that you've put time and care into your work, that'll get you a good grade." So she is affirming that there is a distinction between hard work and careless work, between diligence and laziness. But the proof -- not even of the distinction, but of the affirmation -- must be seen in the grades she gives.
If student 1 spends hours creating a very elaborate picture, and student 2 smears a single brown line of paint across the canvas and calls it done, and the teacher gives both of them A's, she has very clearly demonstrated that she sees no difference between effort and sloth. So her affirmation is a lie. How is this any different from a God who affirms a distinction between good and evil, yet treats all deeds and all lives equally?
Can we allow that maybe "torture" is not the right word here? That perhaps hell is not hell from the view of the damned, but from the view of heaven? That possibly the inhabitants of hell are "kind of okay," with their circumstances, just as they were "kind of okay" creeping through life hurting, robbing, mocking and killing their fellow people?
Obviously all these things are found to be wise and valuable and even divine to a large number of people. But I don't need to carefully examine each and every one of them. Every religion asserts, at its base, one of three possible schematics: only the universe exists; only God exists; or both God and the universe exist. If I have concluded that the third schematic is the true one, then I can easily dismiss (not as useless or uninteresting or immoral, but as ultimately untrue) the majority of religions and worldviews. I am left to consider the arguments for and against Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, deism, and just a handful of other beliefs. Having done so, I find Christianity the most compelling.
Why is it then that mass shootings in America have become so common that they no longer shock us? That all the anti-bullying campaigns have not made a dent in the practice of young people employing social media to harass one another to the point of suicide? That our political system is so deadlocked by ideologues that cooperation in Congress is seen about as frequently as Bigfoot?
It sounds like you're saying, in a nutshell, that a moral nihilist only cares about truth when it is to his advantage to do so.
But in that case he must have some convictions -- must hold certain beliefs as true -- about what constitutes his advantage. So he actually cares about truth pretty much all the time, just like the rest of us.
It was not ever my intent to say that God gives people what they want, but rather that He gives them what they choose. And of course there is a world of difference between wanting and choosing. An alcoholic could dearly want to stop drinking even as he chooses to drink. A compulsive gambler wants a lot of money and yet makes choices that impoverish her. And people could want heaven while routinely make choices that point them towards hell.
That was not accurate, and I regret bringing it up. Even if it were accurate, I forgot that in debate one ought always to pose actuals as hypotheticals; I've been very out of practice.
Now then, considering a hypothetical man who really does despise his family, yet stays with them out of fear of punishment, and does so in such a way that they suspect his true feelings only obliquely, if at all -- how is that contrary to their interests? He is providing for them; they would not have his provision if he left. His presence creates stability; his departure could throw things into chaos. Do you not suppose that the wife and children would adamantly maintain that it is in their best interests to have a husband and father, even if he acts sometimes melancholy and agitated, than to not have one at all?
Do you believe that morality is or ought to be devoid of any utilitarian considerations?
It could very much be to the best interests of those in heaven to not have unrepentant murderers, pedophiles, drug dealers, gangbangers and other scoundrels running loose among them, trying to perpetuate their disastrous life choices out into eternity.
I can hold up two crayons of the exact same color, one labeled "purple" and the other labeled "violet," and affirm that there is a difference between purple and violet. That doesn't make my statement true or meaningful.
(A) God would often have us do things that are unpleasant or even excruciating (see: the crucifixion) out of love; for love is not merely a blissful emotional state. That would be better called infatuation or lust. If a person has made a commitment to a relationship, especially to the extent that he has allowed others to become dependent on him for their well-being, then he ought to, out of love, see that relationship through. For love encompasses duty and self-sacrifice and all manner of things that do not feel good. (I never said that I was in a "loveless" marriage, and certainly not that I "despise" my family -- only that my marriage has been often emotionally taxing and disappointing; and you seem to have conflated emotional disappointment with an absence of love. But the two can and often do coexist.)
(B) I do not believe that hell is a literal place of fire. I have stated that quite clearly. I do believe that if a person makes a habit of seeking separation from his fellow humans, especially those to whom he is beholden (like family and friends), for the sake of expedience or emotional gratification, that such behavior may dispose his soul to seek separation even from God.
(C) If you are a better arbiter or interpreter than me as to what constitutes morality, please produce for me a measuring device so that I can see where I fall short.
How does God affirm the difference between right and wrong? That's what you keep dancing around. For if there really is a difference, then different consequences must follow.
The way I read it, you have life set up like a flag football game for six year-olds. Good deeds are touchdowns and evil deeds are fumbles. But since we're dealing with six year-olds and we don't want to hurt their self-esteem, no one bothers keeping score and in the end everyone wins. Even if you fumble all the time and it becomes a frustration to your teammates, and even to you -- in the end, God overrules all frustration with the affirmation that YOU ARE A WINNER!
So, again, how does God affirm the difference between right and wrong?
Also, I admit that I have been getting overly emotionally invested in this discussion. I apologize for that.
Words straight out of your mouth: I love false dichotomies, I want people to suffer, I'm in denial, I'm morally unconscionable, I'm hypocritical -- and I'm a dick.
Oh, and yet I'm the one who's making this personal?
And you're still evading! You still will not directly (or even indirectly!) answer the question I repeated, for at least the third time, in my reply to Bitsy! Why don't you man up and do that, Highroller, instead of typing another mini-essay about everything that's wrong with me?
Really? Then why have I felt no discourtesy or hostility from Crashing00, or Tiax, or any of the other atheists who have responded in this thread, but only from a Christian?
And Highroller has yet to answer how the idea of God treating Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa exactly the same in the afterlife could possibly be an expression of love (never mind justice); for to render them equivalent is to state that all their acts in this life, everything they invested in building a self-definition, does not actually matter -- and so God mocks or makes a joke of the central aspect of humanity, which He Himself has invested us with.
Why are you still twisting words? Do you delight in portraying me in the worst possible way?
For in the first case you said that it was me trying to justify my self (that is, my essence, my being-ness); and I said, no, it is God who justifies -- again referring to the self. And now you turn it around to imply that I think God would justify my wrong actions, as if He would make evil be good for my sake, which is absurd. But we receive justification apart from our actions, whether wrong or right. "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith -- and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God -- not by works, so that no one can boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9)
As plain as that is, why do you keep trying to trip me up with your rhetorical tricks? What have I done to make you hate me?
If Christianity had no bearing on peoples' personal lives, it wouldn't be worth discussing.
EDIT: I'll get back to you on that.