Trick or Treat
A couple of weeks ago I had occasion to proclaim, “I am Christian gentlemen!” This statement is obviously inaccurate on at least two counts. I said it to a co-worker as an excuse for why I did not want to stop what I was doing, turn around, and check out some random lady’s posterior.
My coworker’s response was, “Well, so am I but…” I can not remember what rationalization, if any, followed. Nor does it matter to me. I already knew the man was a Christian or I would not have bothered.
This is the point that has troubled me for some time. It is utterly inconceivable to many Christians that non-Christians could be moral people. However, I have met moral and immoral Christians, as well as moral and immoral non-believers. As far as I am concerned, whether or not someone is a self-proclaimed Christian is a fairly irrelevant indicator of their character. Especially concerning areas of sexuality as in the example above, it seems that most Christians feel those bits of the Bible were really meant for other people.
Atheists are fully capable of being as moral or more as any Christian, yet I have yet to come across any good argument from an atheist perspective as to where that morality comes from. In this particular instance, I was using the Bible as a convenient shorthand, even if I had to outright lie to do it. There probably was an argument to be made about the importance of respecting women and so forth, but I doubt I could pull that off. I am certainly not going to claim that I have never stared inappropriately at a woman, but at that particular moment, I simply was not interested.