Kathleen is unclear on the definition of Christianity:
Are we to believe a self-proclaimed Christian believer when he insists that he don’t have a dog in this hunt? Call it protective dissonance or just plain ole head-in-the-sand denial, but doesn’t Christianity kinda obligate its followers to open wide and and say “Ah” to the whole ‘I’m-God-and-I-created-the-universe-all-by-myself’ story?
No, Christians must “believe with their heart and confess with their tongue that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Those who follow the way are obligated to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.” The popular notion that subscribing to a specific interpretation of Genesis is required to be a Christian is a little ironic; it is, after all, a Jewish text and I don’t believe anyone has ever suggested that a Jew’s Jewishness depends on his belief in a 24-hour first day.
Satan and all his demons presumably know the precise truth of the origin of the species, and quite possibly of the origin of the Earth as well. They even believe in God as well as His Son.
They are not, however, Christians.
Understanding, wisdom and knowledge are all good things. Wisdom is considered one of the greatest gifts of God. But God desires love and obedience above all. Anyone who is a parent should understand this easily.
And fresh from demonstrating her ignorance of religion, Kathleen demonstrates that she knows nothing about philosophy as well:
Really? So you couldn’t figure out –all by yourself — that murder is unethical, right?
Feministe: “Rape isn’t bad because it’s harmful to people — it’s bad because it pollutes God’s house.”
Looks like she skewered your notion that ‘rape is bad because I have this holy book, see, and it says that rape is a sin cuz it besmircheth the temple of my make-believe skygod.’ Hard to miss, unless you’re projecting ‘cower and whisper’, no?
As more than a few commenters have already pointed out, this doesn’t even begin to address the point I made. To say “rape is bad because it’s harmful” assumes two things:
1) That rape is actually harmful. This is debatable at best, since rape does not inherently require much more physical harm than sexual intercourse. Any potential psychological damage can easily be dismissed as a social artifact of the sort once attached to extramarital sex, which proper social conditioning could and should eliminate. A harm-based argument against rape is rather like arguing against digital copyright violation; the purported harm is nebulous and ill-defined. Rape/copy all you like, at the end of the day, the owner still has the goods.
2) That harming another individual is inherently wrong. There is no shortage of ethical systems which directly reject this, from the “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” of Aleister Crowley and its subsequent revision by W. Somerset Maugham, to the Will to Power of Friedrich Nietzsche, the murderously existential nihilism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the lethal collective imperative of Marx and all his many intellectual descendants. This is a particularly stupid assumption, given that one of the most powerful extant strains of political philosophy denies that the individual has any rights at all and celebrates his negation in the name of social justice and/or revolution.
Feministe’s attempted rebuttal is downright amusing, considering that as a feminist, she publicly identifies herself as an advocate of a collectivist philosophy furiously dedicated to directly harming millions of individuals by means financial, legal and physical. One would have to regard her political allegiance to be in complete violation of her asserted ethics if one were to be so cruel as to take her seriously.