double standards for the catholic church?

Many ppl do. With no fear of the consequences of your actions, there is no incentive not to do it.

i don't think i'm going to die and have to sit infront of st peter and say umm yeah i helped that old lady cross the street and i gave moneyu to charity. u know i don;t live my life thinking i need to be good so i can get into heaven. some people do and i'm fine with that but the bottom line is, religion or not. some people r just bad and some aren;t.

religion doesn;t necesarilly make u a good law abiding citizen and no religion doesn;t necesarilly mean that u have no fear for the conesquences of ur actions.

But the lack of fear in doing wrong has seen a breakdown in communities & increase in crime of recent years. Religion was a way of 'curbing' the behaviour of 'bad people'. Now they just feel they can do what they want.

Most religious problems aren't even to do with Christians though. Most problems are in the middle-eastern countries, where people have been brainwashed into believing that if they strap 50lbs of explosives to themselves and kill 20 people, they will be rewarded in the "afterlife".

Christianity is the religion with the most wars under its belt

bad people r bad people. i doubt telling some degenerate paedophile loser **** that if he rapes a child he'll go to hell will do much to change his train of thought.

u get good people and bad people. religion doesn;t come into it as much as u'd like to think.

Its very debatable whether the Paedophile would go thru with it if that meant he would spend the rest of eternity in hell.

I'm not convinced its a black & white as good & bad people. By labelling people good and bad, u r in fact supporting religious theory. How can someone be born good or bad?? Surely it is very much to do with their upbringing, influences and beliefs.

some people are born good and some people are born bad, others become good or bad depending on their life experiences. cloning hitler wouldn;t necesarilly make him hate jews etc...

the point is that whilst a large amount of people do use to the Bible to make their moral decisions. lots more don't.

and on another level. the moral thing really is a double edged swrod.
tell someone who's genuinely good not to do something bad and they won;t do t. yeah thats nicen fine, might not have been a need for it in the 1st place as i said if someones going to do something bad i don;t think the idea of going to hell will stop them.

on the other hand u can convince a man in Ulster that his religion allows him to blow people up and u can convince a muslim to fly planes into a building.

it's not all the flowery nicety alot of people like to see it as.

I'd consider myself a good person, but not because of religion or any crap like that...because I have a conscience. I know that it is wrong to kill people, but even if I hadn't been told it was a law, I still wouldn't do it. If I did, I know I'd feel really guilty about it. The same with any serious crime.