Why the negativity?

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florin1 said:
morality is just made up from a set of rules. And rules, by definition, are meant to control or self-control.
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Some are. And maybe what I am about to say falls under self control.

The rules of morality are more like the rules of learning to play a musical instrument. You can ignore them all, but you aren’t going to make music. By following the rules, you gain the freedom to play music.

Rules of morality give you the freedom to live a virtuous life. It isn’t control or necessarily self control.

With the rules of morality, you are subject to the moral law. If you deny the moral law, you are subject to the consequences of breaking the moral law whether you know about the law or not. If you obey the law even though you resent it for controlling you, you are subject to the law itself—you are not free to do your own bidding. If you love God and want to do His will, you are no longer subject to the law or the consequences of breaking the law, and yet still you live consistent with the law. You are a freely choosing how to live your life. Even if the rules did not exist, still you would make those choices because you love Jesus Christ and choose to follow His way.

That is freedom. Not control.
 
Well I was originally making the claim that you can’t have a proper foundation for morality without God, so i was giving examples of the most warped cases where people have used relative standards of morals to justify horrendous things. I’ve read Marx and as much as i dislike him, i wouldn’t say it was badly written or didn’t flow, Mein Kampf however… !
 
Wow. If you see this all of the time, that must be a difficult place to work or live.
 
I’m not an apologist for every action so what i’m going to do is argue in one in favour and one against the two examples you gave.

So let’s start with the crusades. There are very few wars in history that can objectively be called “religious wars”. For example, democracy in England only really starts in 1688 with the glorious revolution. Before that you have a fedual system with no separation of church and state. The national leadership of that time would have seen nothing odd about the concept of an athiest bishop, as an example. Because a bishop had two roles (church and state). Therefore, it’s virtually impossible to objectively say that a person performing two roles was primarily motivated by the weaker one.

The Inquisition, i’m just going to say for the sake of arguement that every single death under the Inquisition was unjust and i’m going to use the absolute maximum estimate of the death toll, which is ~3x bigger than the most likely estimate. Let’s be fair and consider the world population at the time too and compare it to the record of the moral relativists:
  • Spanish inquisition deaths: 45,000, world population: 500,000,000, percentage: 0.009%
  • Holocaust deaths: 6,000,000, world population: 2,370,000,000, percentage: 0.253%
  • Great leap forward deaths: 60,000,000, world population: 2,960,000,000, percentage: 2.027%
If i added Stalin then you’d get a similar figure to Mao and notice i didn’t even lump all the WW2 deaths on Hitlers shoulders, just the holocaust. Scale matters and that’s where moral relativism takes the world.
 
This is as a cruel and hurtful rebuttal on these boards I have read in a long time. I pray that what ever bitterness you might have in your heart to feel and speak in such a way is healed by our Lord, and that you find joy in your heart.
 
Depends on the measures, most are long term trends in the same direction. in terms of war deaths it’s the 1960’s with the Vietnam war, India & Pakistan, Israel, troubles in Northern Ireland and many communist proxy wars. Murders were lower in the United States 1960’s than the 70’s, 80’s and most the 90’s though.
 
Why so? You really can’t ignore the scale of events. it’s especially relevant when atheists make the claim that religion causes wars or has killed more people than anything else. Religion doesn’t come remotely close to the numbers communism has ‘achieved’.
 
Marx was logical to a point, he acknowledges counter-arguements in Das Kapital but just fobs them off with angry remarks and no real logic.
 
Yeah good chat 🙂

You can try the jack the Ripper arguement on God at the time of judgement and see what he says. I think i agree with you that it wouldn’t work but personally i’m going fully loaded with every arguement possible 😂
 
How am I the one being “cruel and hurtful”? He is the one who said outright that he thinks the vast majority of people are going to Hell. Do you consider that even slightly unsettling, or is stuff like that the normal train of thought around here?

Okey, I understand I might have been too harsh. I’m sorry if my wording seemed angry, but stuff like that is difficult to be patient with. If someone told you that everyone you loved would be tortured forever, and felt good believing this, that would bother you too.
 
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Here’s an example of warped priorities (in my opinion), there are more current threads on the subject of masturbation (negative) than there are replies on a thread called “charity to help Rohingya” (positive). I’d say people really need to pay more attention to our Holy Father if they are more preoccupied with the former than the latter.
 
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@ChunkMonk
 
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Remember that people are far more likely to turn to an anonymous forum on negative or embarrassing topics than about positive ones or those that would be welcome around their dinner table. You can start a charity with the people at your parish. You’re not likely to ask them how to handle your masturbation temptations or how distracting you find it when their daughter wears skirts cut up to there and down to there!

If some posters are being Debbie Downers here, maybe that means someone who sees them face-to-face is seeing them after they’ve vented here and got over things a bit. It gives people a chance to see a different perspective or to find ways of coping with something difficult or embarrassing.
 
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