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Comment by pmdulaney | Hacker News Reader

Well, first of all, it is a foundational principle of democracy that you can vote how you like for whatever reason you like. You can vote for a rule that every governing board have at least one woman because you hate men!

But as a matter of fact, Christians who are Christians in more than name only do everything of import because of Jesus -- or because of biblical teaching more generally. I believe that I should tell the truth because of Jesus. I believe that divorce is wrong because of Jesus. I believe that those who take a life should forfeit their own because of Jesus (Gen 9.6).

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If you need a demigod and a book of fiction to tell you not to lie, cheat and kill then you aren't a very good person underneath.

Morality and ethics are not the exclusive purview of Christianity, or even religion in general. Atheists and agnostics don't need a bible to tell right from wrong.

In fact, religion is often used as an excuse to subjugate others, which is what they're doing by overturning RvW. They are subjugating women of breeding age as baby factories and unpaid child minders whose life course is decided on whether a man ejaculates in her and fertilizes an egg or not (whether she wanted him to or not.) If she catches, her life is no longer hers. It now belongs to the state as a incubation vessel for a potential citizen, and her wishes are now unimportant.

First of all, I need a full-fledged God, not a mere demigod, and it is a factual error to call the Bible or the Koran or the Book of Mormon a book of fiction. You can, from your omniscient point of view, call it false, but it is not a work of fiction if its author believes it to be true.

You may be right; perhaps atheists and agnostics don't need a Bible to tell right from wrong, but that isn't something even atheists themselves have agreed on. The whole angst of the European existentialist movement had to do with the realization that without a god everything and anything was permissible (including abortion, one assumes).

> Christians who are Christians in more than name only do everything of import because of Jesus

I am not sure Jesus would agree

Most Christians agree that the Apostle Paul speaks authoritatively for Jesus (that's actually the definition of an apostle), and Paul said:

"Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God" (1 Cor 10.31).

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