Do you know the difference between right and wrong?
Ok, we all flail around helplessly in the grey areas posed by philosophy teachers and medical and legal ethicists, but they are professionals and paid to be smart-arses. As an amateur, I have a fairly strong sense of practical ethics, as I am sure do you, gentle reader, in contrast, it seems, to Christians.
Twice recently I have come across Christians who claim that without divine guidance they wouldn’t know the difference between right and wrong. Since they didn’t say this to me (one was in a reported interview, the other in a conversation with someone else) I didn’t have the chance to say “woah, back up a minute there, do you mean what I think you mean?”
What they’ve said implies that their moral compass is kept in the giant map-drawer in the sky.
Do they mean this? It’s what they said, after all, so I have to assume they do. Even so, I find it hard to believe that they’d be out there, nicking things from Tescos, raping donkeys, falsifying their tax return and knifing people to death if it wasn’t for the Big Guy. Is the ONLY THING stopping them from doing this explicit divine instruction not to? Are they claiming to be barely controlled psychopaths who simply happen to have a nicer class of imaginary friend than Peter Sutcliffe did?
I don’t know.
I don’t want to rant, so I’ll stop here. I don’t know what it does to them, but what they’ve said makes me gibber and gives me a stabbing pain right behind the eyes.
