Unlike Unitarians who can spend days dissecting the nuances of whether a person’s action falls short of ideal, the religious right is quick to label questionable actions as sins. This trait should make it easy to develop an algorithm to determine if someone is worthy or unworthy of their support.
One could simply build a spreadsheet and label each column with what one considers a sin. I’ll let the Christians who claim to be experts on sins label the columns. Some suggestions might be lies, affairs, deaths caused, abortions paid for, sexual indiscretions, lack of empathy and financial misdeeds.
The last would include such things as questionable bankruptcies, extortion, blackmail and broken contracts. You also could have a column for each of the cardinal sins (pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, lust).
When you conclude that the individual you’re judging has committed one of the sins you’ve listed, you simply put a 1 in the row beneath the column affected. Finally, as a Christian, you can decide how many lies makes someone a liar, how many affairs makes someone an adulterer, how many deaths caused makes someone a killer, etc.
You should expect extremes.
For instance, Mother Theresa, who strived to be a good person, would have a near blank table, possibly a couple of white lies. If you were to judge yourself, you would probably see a mostly blank table with a couple worrisome columns. Donald Trump, who appears to have as a goal the maxing of every column, would have few open cells.
This is where this exercise gets interesting. If you asked atheists to look at the results of these three tables, they would unanimously come to the conclusion that the tables show a saint, an average person and a psychopath. The Christian right might agree on the first two tables but, based on how they voted and their fervent defense of Trump’s actions, the God fearing Christian right would say that the third table shows someone who walks in the steps of Jesus.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say someone is kidding themselves. Maybe next time they attend church, the Christians may want to take the time to ask God what he/she thinks.
Frank T. Globokar, Cottonwood Heights