I am not better than anyone else. The difference between you and me is only, that i received grace and forgiveness upon my repentence and faith in Jesus Christ.
The fact that your self-righteousness comes from your humility doesn't make it any less self-righteous.
No , i don't. Please explain, how justice can be done, if God, and a judge of everything we have done here on earth, does not exist. Go ahead, please.
I already explained it in the post that you just got done responding to. You have a very bad habit of going over people's posts, not to see if they're saying something you might not know or if they might actually have a point to what they're saying, but to argue with them and show that you have the right of things. In fairness, this is hardly unique to you, and I think everyone does that sometimes. The key is to know when you're doing it and when it's not appropriate.
As for explaining it again...let me turn your statement on its head to show you why that's such a flawed way to look at justice. You are basically saying that justice cannot be done unless some all-powerful being who watches everything we do in life is standing by to punish people after they die for what they did in life. Except, nobody can actually know that this is what's happening, which defeats the purpose of such a thing to begin with. If people don't believe in it, what reason do they have to expect it to happen? Or worse, if they stop believing in it, what reason do they have not to do it?
The most basic concept of justice is fairness. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth...what one does to others will be done to them. All of that is fundamentally about fairness, about trying to promote the fair treatment of other people. Except that with Christianity, it's not about fairness. It's about getting people to believe in Jesus as savior. The idea, I suppose, is that if they believe their sins are forgiven, they'll have no reason not to treat other people well. Except it doesn't work that way in the real world. People who believe their sins are automatically forgiven, who believe they have a spot reserved for them in a heavenly paradise, have no incentive to promote real fairness in this life. Indeed, they actually have an incentive to be unfair, because after all, they can just go back and ask for more forgiveness from Jesus. So what if some other people get trampled under their unfairness? Either those people believe, in which case they're destined for the same place, or they don't believe, in which case they're destined for some other place. It stops being about promoting fairness, instead being about promoting belief.
Justice isn't about giving people what they deserve.
Morals are prescriptive, and its very well exactly about that.
What makes you think that I didn't know that morals were prescriptive? The fact that morals are prescriptive doesn't have anything to do with justice being about what someone deserves. As I said, justice is fundamentally about fairness - everyone having access to the same opportunities for personal and societal growth, and keeping people from getting into some truly awful situations that they might not be able to help.
Exactly. Because you are not authorized to do so. But God has the authority to judge our lives, because he is our creator.
Oh? So what if the person who shot some other person believed they had a mandate from God to do so? How could you possibly gainsay them? According to them, God delegated the authority to do so to them.
And in any case, I don't accept your contention. The fact that someone has authority in something does not make what they do justice. Indeed, the ways someone can abuse that authority are myriad, especially if they have nothing to keep them in check. To put it another way, we can trust the authority that, say, judges in this country have, because those judges are accountable to something - Congress, the Constitution, and ultimately, the people. So, who is God accountable to?
Correct. And if God does not exist. Gaddhafi killed thousands of people, plundered his country, and got away with it. Thats NOT right.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Ghaddafi die? I fail to see how someone dying counts as "getting away with it". I mean, if he'd escaped to some island country without an extradition treaty and got to enjoy a cushy retirement out of his ill-gotten gains, then yeah, I'd agree he "got away with it". But he died after being overthrown from his power. That's plenty of punishment, and we don't have to add imagined punishments
[1] by some all-powerful being after the fact for there to be 'justice'.
Fair is that he is brought to trial, and becomes exactly what he deserves, for what he did on earth. Its not right, that thousands suffered because of his evylness, and that he never has to suffer for what he did.
Understand this if you understand nothing else that I say;
vengeance is not justice! And when you start talking about someone 'deserving' to suffer because of suffering they inflicted on others, that's nothing but pure vengeance talking. Certainly it would have been better if he'd been brought to trial, because if someone can flagrantly do evil, it's not justice. But if you're putting someone on trial because you want to hurt them like they hurt other people, you aren't seeking justice.
Justice is about making it impossible for someone like Ghadafi to do - and to keep doing - what he did, not about punishing them after the fact.
Then freedom of choice is gone. Welcome to the robots.
Not hardly. Even freedom of choice can't justify allowing someone to do evil and continue doing evil. And after-the-fact punishment is a really shoddy way to try to stop them and others from doing it. No, the way to make that sort of thing impossible
[2] is to remove any possible benefit from it. And you don't do that by claiming that people go to some eternal punishment after death, because they still get the benefit from whatever they did in the meantime.
But that is what would be fair. If someone would rape and kill your doughter, and dies right afterwards doing it a silent, peaceful dead, what would you think ? was it fair ? was it right ? If God does not exist, exactly this happens, all the time.
Really? Think about that for a moment. If your God, the one who judges everyone does not exist, and thus death is oblivion, I think a "silent, peaceful" death would be no better than a violent one. The rapist is dead regardless of the cause, and will stay dead, and didn't get away with anything. So what would imagining him roasting in a fiery furnace, or otherwise being judged, accomplish? It might make someone still alive feel better about it, but that's about it, and to be honest, I imagine keeping it in mind like that might actually make things worse for them in the long run. I mean, every time they think about it, they're almost certainly going to remember the stuff that went with it. No, I can't imagine that way of thinking being worth the cost of remembering why.
