Originally posted by twhitehead
My claim here is that Christians generally show less guilt/remorse/personal responsibility for bad behaviour and thus are less likely to correct that behaviour and also find comfort in a theology that lets them shift the blame.
Actually I see it quite the opposite. Believers recognize when they have done something bad, and feel very guilty over it. The believer, knowing that his/her bad behavior has not gone unnoticed by God, is driven to repent and correct the behavior.
Going all the way to the core of it, I do hold God responsible for all things, good or bad. How could God not be ultimately responsible when He created all of it from scratch in the first place? However that doesn't in any way whatsoever absolve the creation from responsibility when it does something bad,
especially when it knows better in the first place.
It's not as if responsibility for evil acts must either be God's responsibility or the evildoer's responsibility. God created us with the ability to commit sin. What we do with that ability and the choices we make, are our responsibility.
It's kind of ironic. It seems as though most unbelievers think the only way God could have been fair is for Him to have created us with the inability to sin. But really, what sense does that make? He might as well have just built a bunch of robots, programmed to love Him unconditionally, with no choice to do anything else. That certainly wouldn't be satisfactory to God, or any of us. But again, when you boil down much of the arguments presented against God, this is what the unbelievers seem to be in favor of. They basically argue that since God gave us the ability not to love Him, and the ability to sin, then He has no right to punish us for acting on that ability.
Seems to me that what God was after, was to create special beings that have the choice to love Him or hate Him, and then in the end, provide a permanent place alongside Him for all those who love Him, and reject the rest. Wheat, chaff, and all that.