squibbles wrote:I hope that you can actually understand this, because I dunno if it makes any sense at all. :/
I understand it perfectly, and I understand that it makes no sense at all. Neither your belief in something nor your ability to convey it coherently have any bearing on whether or not the idea is sensible.
In an effort to avoid drowning you in words, I'll bring up my two main concerns:
The moral teachings of religions are given context by their existential claims. Christianity does not teach you not to kill because it's a bad idea, but not to kill because you will get skullfucked by demons if you do, and this presupposes the existence of demons who are sadistic, a place for them to be, and a God who will deliver you to that place after your death. If you do not believe that these demons exist, then you should not find the reason that Christianity gives you to refrain from killing to be particularly motivating. For another relevant example, consider that Satanism instructs you to indulge your carnal desires because you are unburdened by the oppression that would be imposed upon you by Christian teachings (with explicit mention of the Seven not-so-Deadly Sins and the backwards Seven Virtues). If you believe in the smallest part of Christianity's existential claims, then you should recognize that the Seven Deadly Sins
will send you to Hell, that living by the Seven Virtues
will ensure your place in Heaven, and that doing the opposite is profoundly stupid; Satanism's reasons for you to indulge presuppose that the existential claims made by Christianity are false.
It'd have been one thing to try to reconcile, say, Christianity and Islam, where your primary points of contention would probably revolve around the divinity of Jesus (according to the 4th Sura of the Koran, Jesus was never executed). But you've done something rather interesting: I can't think of a pair religions that could possibly have more of their doctrines in direct and even explicit conflict with one another than the ones you've chosen. Practically every teaching of one of these argues on grounds that the other denies; if you believe either, it makes no sense to believe in any of the teachings of the other.
If it is the case that you follow the same teachings as a religion but not for the reasons the religions give, that does not qualify you as an adherent of that religion. I refrain from killing because it would cause me great psychological distress and because it would be a tremendous practical burden to get away with it even if my conscience could cope with it in the first place. I do not believe in a God who will judge me nor in demons who will punish me; it is not on their account that I do not kill. Even though I share a rule to live by, I do so for entirely different reasons, and therefore I have no business calling myself a Christian. Even if I hold by
every rule that a Christian should live by, I would have to hold to
all of them for reasons that include those founded upon the existential claims made by Christianity in order to call myself a Christian. If you follow Christian teachings only "because they seem like good ideas," you would be dishonest to call yourself a Christian.
But secondly, you're doing something that it continues to surprise me happens with alarming frequency: you are arbitrarily piecing together your own religion without realizing the implications of doing so. The primary implication of this is, obviously, that
you are making it all the fuck up. It's one thing to have someone convince you of some nonsense they made up, and that's embarrassing all on its own, but to actually go through the conscious creative process of spawning arbitrary facts from your imagination only to follow it up with
genuine belief in its validity is... I'm not even sure I can think of a suitable phrase here... mind-bogglingly ignorant, totally intellectually dishonest... utterly fucking insane. It's just... I really feel I need to emphasize this more: you are making things up, and then you are believing them to be true. You are
making things up. And then you are
believing them to be true.
This mindset is particularly frustrating to me because people who do this are
so close to understanding the nature of religion without actually making that last hair's-breadth connection. Every time someone changes churches or denominations because the God of that church or denomination doesn't share his views on some trivial social issue, every time someone flips through the Bible and absorbs "love thy neighbor" but skips right over "stone the bride to death if she is not a virgin," every time someone invents details of their god on the fly despite the total lack of those details in the scriptures or the works of any religious authority, without realizing that the religion they hold to is more than not an invention of their own mind, I die a little on the inside. And if you want to get ironic, it's not a stretch to imagine someone saying that this makes the Baby Jesus cry, which is itself the invention of a quality and proscription of it to the Baby Jesus who exists only in his mind.
Riddle me those.