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comment by oyster
oyster  ·  2220 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why Evangelicals—Still!—Support Trump

Question - If you already think your morals are superior to others ( even if you don’t think every bit of you is superior ) than how do you analyze your actions and change ? How do you grow ?

For understandings sake, let me lay out the religious people I know. I think the other religious ones pretend to like them (Is pretending to like somebody morally right ?) They’ll say that their religion has moral supremacy but they’re a flawed little human. ( I know you say you live by these morals so you’re not claiming the same thing ). They’ll preach to other people the morals of this religion and every time they realize they’ve been a shit person for the past few months conveniently have a revelation and decide that they’ll be different like yesterday. Except changing a behaviour doesn’t happen over night and then they just fail and the cycle repeats.

Thing is ? It’s not even that these people don’t want to admit to themselves or to us regular folks, they don’t want to admit that they aren’t perfect and God’s lights ain’t going to change that. Hard work and determination changes that. So they all just fake it until they die.

So, back to my point, they have an out when they realize they’ve been a shit person via the gods moral/I’m flawed approach. You say that the morals you live by are better than everybody else’s. So you can’t admit when you’ve been wrong. In my opinion that means you can’t grow in any meaningful way without admitting that maybe your morals aren’t perfect considering they drive most of or decisions.

It’s like when school children go to Africa and help build schools. My friend was there doing something else for a bit, you know what happened at night to the building ? The local men went and fixed everything the kids did wrong. Tell these school kids this and instead of going oh wow I didn’t realize I wasn’t helping at all I should shift my focus they get upset and defensive. You know why ? Because they only ever did it to feed a false sense of morality. Feeling like they’ve done the right thing is actually more important than doing the right thing.

So what sets you apart ? How do you take in new information and actually reanalyze your actions if you already think your morality compass is the best ? How do you grow in this regard ?