To say that we should instead be driven to goodness out of fear of divine retribution is as laughably ridiculous as it is tragically sad.The most devout Christians I know are not running away from Hell, they are running towards Christ. My wife volunteers at hospice as does a family friend of ours. The evangelicals at Pt. Loma Nazarene host the annual San Diego Special Olympics. I volunteer to coach kids' sports. We don't do this because we're afraid of some kind of eternal damnation, but because we're trying to be more Christ-like in our lives.
This is not one of my worries.
Similarly, the sacrament of Confession is less about avoiding the fires of Hell and more about learning from your mistakes and trying to become more loving in your life. I can't remember the last time one of my confessions wasn't used as an object lesson by the priest to become more loving in the things I do.
Striving to be more like Christ is the essence of Christianity. Yes, there is such a thing as sin and Hell, but that concerns me less than where I am on the road to living my life in a Christian way.
* - My repeated battles with my polemicist nature come not from the fact that screaming at people is a sin, but instead from the fact that it is an unloving thing to do.
4 comments:
... but Love is the greatest of these.
Whether you are running from the metaphysical stick or towards a metaphysical carrot; being a Christian implies a moral code. I think where the train goes off the track is that being an atheist is simply disbelief in a higher power, it is not something you get a moral code from, any more than disbelieving in leprechauns or String theory can give you a moral code.
That said, the fact that atheists cannot derive their moral code from being atheists, does not necessarily mean they don't have one.
Anon, they have a personal one and personal decisions are always clouded by our own personalities. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis siad that he refused to comment on sins he was not tempted to commit. Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing one and we typically tend to rationalize away our own faults.
One more thing. The folks I am familiar with who are most Christ-like, do not think in terms of either reward or punishment. They do what they do out of love for their fellow human beings. In being Christ-like, they are humble as well and do not presume to be worthy of praise or heaven. Loving others becomes a natural habit and not a cost-benefits choice.
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