>The lack of consistency in Christian behavior does not imply that Christian morality is on the whole unhelpful.
I wasn't trying to say that it's unhelpful, just make the point that it's not uniform. If someone says "we should follow christian values" the necessary followup question is "which christian values?"
"""And one of them, a lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."""
Most people have a hard enough time with those. But, you might say, what about the details? What about white lies and second donuts? That was also covered by Jesus:
"""Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others."""
The details might seem inconsistent and controversial, but the basic morality isn't all that convoluted or up for discussion. People just don't like thinking about how everyone is bad at the fundamental stuff.
Anyway, Christian philosophy is pretty coherent even if the people aren't. And it's not clear that your expectations of consistency are required for there to be social benefits to Christian belief in particular or religious belief more generally.
There are millions of christians who disagree with you. But yeah sure, clearly you're the one person in the world who has it right!
You're right about my expectation of consistency for there to be social benefit. I just have an expectation of consistency from those claiming to have a monopoly on fundamental truth in the universe. My expectation has nothing to do with social good in that case.
> There are millions of christians who disagree with you.
About The Greatest Commandment and the Golden Rule? As directly quoted from Jesus? If so, this definition of "Christian" is far too encompassing to be useful in this discussion.
> But yeah sure, clearly you're the one person in the world who has it right!
What I'm quoting is even less controversial than the Nicene Creed, which is unanimous among major Christian denominations. They can't even agree on what day of the week is the sabbath and what day of the year is Easter, but they all agree on The Nicene Creed. And they absolutely agree on The Greatest Commandment.
There is not as much controversy about the basics as you seem to think there is.
Numerous variants of the Golden rule predate Christianity and there are few if any direct quotes of Jesus that survive. The gospels were written decades later. Oddly Jesus doesn't appear to have written or had someone record his wisdom directly, despite Aristotle setting an example with his 18 books of ethics over 300 years earlier.
I guess I led with the wrong thing. Mainly pointing out that they are not, in the strictest sense anyway, "directly quoted from Jesus" (and it kinda boggles my mind that he wouldn't have the foresight to write things down clearly to help keep things clear and consistent, which would not even have been unprecedented at the time)
I wasn't trying to say that it's unhelpful, just make the point that it's not uniform. If someone says "we should follow christian values" the necessary followup question is "which christian values?"