Where could you possibly have gotten that I think everyone is perfect and that a god created us that way?
Well, you said Christianity is terrible because in order to be a Christian you must believe you’re a terrible person and can never be good (which is incorrect BTW, but we’ll save that for later).
So since you said that this was a terrible belief, and you didn’t provide any alternative, I simply took the opposite stance and showed how that isn’t any better. Also, I didn’t say that this is what you were arguing for, I very clearly asked you what your preferred alternative was.
Religion, and Christianity in particular, is a terrible belief system and it causes cognitive dissonance and psychosis. Christianity creates pain and suffering and turns otherwise good people into monsters. You’ve not refuted that at all.
And you haven’t proven that this is the case either, or do you happen to have any studies that show that mental illness is more prevalent in Christians than in atheists, or at least the population as a whole? Otherwise I assume you’re just working with anecdotal evidence, such as having been raised by Christian parents whom you consider psychotic. Unfortunately, that’s not enough evidence to condemn all of the approx. 2.4 billion people in the world who consider themselves Christian. Even if, say, all of the Christians in the United States were demonstrably psychotic, that wouldn’t be enough evidence to condemn Christianity as a whole (although it would at least warrant suspicion that the two may be linked).
Now, as far as misrepresenting Christian beliefs goes, you said that Christians believe that people can never be good and therefore must always feel terrible about themselves. That’s not the case. It’s rather that people can never be perfect and therefore should always strive to improve. Do you see the difference? One interpretation says “you’ll never come anywhere close to God’s perfection so you might as well give up and not even try”, the other says “you may not ever reach perfection, but you’ll certainly come closer to it if you keep trying.”
Yes, unlike you, who is showing great empathy and totally not relying on the concept of pain and punishment by posting a derisive response attacking my character without responding to any of the arguments I made.
Basically, all you have said is “you are bad, therefore you should feel bad.”
I’m sorry that my comment has made you upset, but you haven’t given any clear indication of what was wrong with it, so I’m afraid I can’t help you feel better about it, and instead I can only assume that your being upset has nothing to do with the comment you’re responding to, but is instead just a reactionary expression of your ongoing displeasure about a lengthy discussion we had the other day about a city in Tennessee explicitly mentioning homosexuality in their law about public decency.
Also, I’d like to point out that empathy isn’t the same as sympathy. Empathy is simply the capacity to understand another person’s point of view, it doesn’t require agreeing with it.