Reading the comments on this website, it’s clear there are some atheists out there who have even more of a mission to unconvert believers than most believers have to convert them!

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The doctrine of ‘just war’ was developed in order to emphasize that, though war is always an evil, sometimes it is the lesser of two evils.

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It all depends what your ‘faith’ is. If you believe that the present world of space, time and matter is basically trash, from which we are supposed to be rescued, then who cares?

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In classic Christian teaching God's free offer of forgiveness always stands, but to accept forgiveness means, well, accepting forgiveness. It doesn't mean hearing the word of forgiveness and saying, in effect, 'well, that's OK, because actually there wasn't anything to forgive'. You can't pretend to accept forgiveness and turn forgiveness, as you do so, into 'tolerance' or 'well, it didn't matter that much.'

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This is rather like those questions where you're invited to 'pick your all-time favorite baseball/cricket/football team' where everybody knows it's just a cheerful but meaningless exercise... and of course in classic theology teachers have emphasized that all the seven deadlies are variations on dysfunctional humanity, humanity being less than it was made to be, humans failing to worship the living creator God and so failing to reflect his image into the world.

That's why the seven deadlies tend to reinforce one another. In our case in the western world I think pride is obviously a major failing: the massive implicit pride in our western achievements, technology, science etc., which somehow give us license to imagine that we are also superior in our worldview, our 'developed' moralities etc., and in many other ways too.

That way, our pride in being western post-enlightenment humans (or indeed our pride in having attained the degree of sophistication to call ourselves post-modernists!) gives us the further license to make up our own rules or non-rules or anti-rules, including the greed that says we can and must do what we like with the world, the planet, with other people's ecosystems, other people's bodies, and the hubris that says since it's all for our benefit anyway the aim of the game is to 'die young as late as possible', whereas I notice that for many generations of Christians the aim would have been to be killed for a mature faith as early as possible...

Anyway, scattered thoughts in response to a scattering question!

The Question: What does the Eliot Spitzer scandal say about our public and private morality? Should he have resigned?

Public life, no less than private, is a matter of trust. If someone deceives their spouse, chances are they won't have much compunction about deceiving the public.