Matthew 7:15-20<\/a><\/p>\nCompare Luke 6:43-45<\/p>\n
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These verses contain one of the most obviously useful rules in scripture.<\/p>\n
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Sound religious teaching should have positive implications in day-to-day life.<\/p>\n
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Obviously, of course, any particular religious individual may be inferior, in terms of behavior, etc., to some particular irreligious or theologically-different individual. \u00a0And particularly so at any particular time.<\/p>\n
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I\u2019m talking in the aggregate, of overall tendencies. \u00a0Of communities over time.<\/p>\n
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And, of course, any specific given religious person may have started off from a less advantaged point than some particular secular person, so that, for him, having started out at 2.3, reaching 5 on a \u201cgoodness scale\u201d of 1-10 may be a more notable achievement than the secularist\u2019s reaching 8 may be, the secularist having started out at 7.5 (or at 9!).<\/p>\n
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\u201dHow could you be so wicked?\u201d Nancy Mitford once exploded at the English Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh after he\u2019d behaved\u00a0particularly badly, even for him. \u00a0(He was famously difficult, and a notorious curmudgeon.) \u00a0\u201dI thought you were supposed to be religious,\u201d she said. \u201dYou can\u2019t imagine,\u201d he replied, \u201dhow much worse I should be if I were not religious.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Please note that I don\u2019t really think such things are quantifiable, and that I don\u2019t actually have a judgmental \u201cgoodness scale.\u201d \u00a0Spare me the expressions of outrage and indignation on that score, please. \u00a0And don\u2019t bother to tell me that unbelievers can be good people. \u00a0I know that. \u00a0I know many of them.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 Matthew 7:15-20 Compare Luke 6:43-45 \u00a0 These verses contain one of the most obviously useful rules in scripture. \u00a0 Sound religious teaching should have positive implications in day-to-day life. \u00a0 Obviously, of course, any particular religious individual may be inferior, in terms of behavior, etc., to some particular irreligious or theologically-different individual. \u00a0And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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