The immorality of Christianity

I came across a series of questions on Yahoo! Answers that demonstrate just how hard it is to keep this religion thing straight in a world that just doesn't fit nicely into right and wrong. The question went roughly along these lines:

• if an American soldier kills an Iraqi, where does he go when he dies?

The answers to this ranged from the flippant ("You tell me!"), to the insulting ("Iraqi hell!"), to the thoughtful. Two that are worth a mention are:

"If he followed the laws and commands of his government he has done as God commanded. God alone will judge the intent of his heart."

and

"If he has accepted Christ as his Savior, Heaven. If he has rejected Christ, Hell."

The first point to make is that obviously no-one knows. Because no-one knows, anyone seems to be allowed to make stuff up - and people have no problem in doing so. The consequences of letting people make it up are the two statements above, both of which are problematical.

The first one would have given a blank check to every German that ever did anything for the Nazi party, no matter how abominable. It even implies that God insisted that Germans should have done what the Nazis told them to do because that is "as God commanded."

The second one gives a blank check to everyone who does anything bad ever. This has profoundly bad moral implications. We can kill and accept Christ and go to heaven. Presumably this get-out-of-eternal-jail clause applies to all crimes, no matter how heinous, as long as the criminal is a believer. This means atheism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Islamism and Zoroastrianism are all worse crimes than pederasty, parricide and prostitution. For example.

That's one mixed up moral code - certainly not much of a moral guide for the rest of us.