Comment of the Week Redefining Immorality and Morality

You may have noticed at some point that the defenses of "morality" from the Christian Right tend to look a lot more like promotions of gross immorality. How does that happen? How do exceptionally immoral positions come be lauded as the pinnacle of moral behavior? How do people become so twisted that they imagine hate and violence are moral, righteous, and decent?

In response to:

"Nothing, therefore, can justify a direct abortion. . . . .since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church."

Rosemary writes:

The problem with this amazing reasoning is that this "fact" is only knowable by "human hearts" that have been indoctrinated by the Christian Catholic Church or, in the last few decades, by American-style evangelical faction of the Christian church. People who use their brains to reason, instead of their indoctrinated hearts, come to very different and far more humane conclusions.

The bottom line is that the most blatantly Christian people advocate deeply immoral acts while redefining them as "moral" acts of the highest order. The truth that is obvious to outsiders (the non-indoctrinated) is that these people have it backwards: they are the ones that are failing to live up to the highest and most humane of moral standards.

If they think that their god approves of this type of human brutality then they are worshiping a moral monster and allow their "hearts" to obscure the horrific reality.

I am so glad that I was never instructed in this type of mind warping malevolence.

[original post]

The answer to my question is probably as depressing as it is simple: people are subsuming any natural feelings of sympathy and empathy for their fellow human beings to the demands on an absolutist deity which allegedly wants blood, purity, and sacrifice. Human needs are subordinated to divine demands. Human suffering is deemed acceptable for the sake of divine purity.

You, as a human being, are irrelevant and meaningless in comparison to whatever a god wants -- and no matter how much god-believers insist that their god is loving, you will always be dispensable in comparison to their god.

Don't believe me? Ask them -- ask them what they would do if they sincerely and genuinely believed that their god wanted them to take away some of your rights, reduce your liberty, harm you, or even kill you. Saying "my god wouldn't do that" isn't an answer unless they want to claim to possess perfect knowledge of the nature, will, and plans of their god.