(Your way of phrasing the question suggests you might be looking for a pointless argument with me. If that's the case, please stop.)

No, that is not the case. It does appear that I had misunderstood what you said, though.

My remark was not about the "fully responsible" part, but about the "your fault" part.

This being the misunderstanding.

I think I now see more clearly what you were saying. You were saying that a statement along the lines of "Everything wrong in your life is YOUR FAULT!" would be making people feel guilty on purpose. This I agree with.

(What I thought you were saying - and what I did not agree with - is now unimportant.)

I apologise for my error.

Saying "you are responsible for your own choices" is making people feel guilty on purpose?

I wasn't speaking about "did not". I was speaking about "will not", which is distinct from "can not" and is a form that can only be employed by a speaker with sufficient certainty about the future - unknown to me, but not to an omniscient being.

But we don't even need to look to God's forced familial cannibalism in Jeremiah. The bedrock of Christianity is the threat of eternal torment for a thought crime: not believing in Jesus.

According to official Catholic doctrine:

Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved.

In other words, trying to do the right thing counts.

"The LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him". Again, I don't see how God could have possibly made it any clearer that the intent of putting the mark on Cain was to prevent the otherwise very real possibility of people killing him.

Looking at another translation:

So the Lord put a mark on Cain to warn anyone who met him not to kill him.

And the Lord set a [protective] [b]mark (sign) on Cain, so that no one who found (met) him would kill him.

(footnote: "Many commentators believe this sign not to have been like a brand on the forehead, but something awesome about Cain’s appearance that made people dread and avoid him. In the Talmud, the rabbis suggested several possibilities, including leprosy, boils, or a horn that grew out of Cain. But it was also suggested that Cain was given a pet dog to serve as a protective sign.")

The Lord put a sign on Cain so that no one who found him would assault him.

And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.

So the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one would kill him at sight.

Then the Lord put a mark on Cain to warn anyone who might try to kill him.

Yahweh appointed a sign for Cain, so that anyone finding him would not strike him.

Looking over the list, most of them do say something along the lines of "so that no one would kill him", but there are a scattering of others. I interpret is as saying that the sign given to Cain was a clear warning - something easily understood as "DO NOT KILL THIS MAN" - but I don't see any sign that it was ever actually necessary to save Cain's life.

If you're not sure, then you must believe that there could be circumstances under which killing six members of a person's family as punishment for a crime they did not commit could be justified. I find that deeply disturbing.

There is a fallacy at work here. Consider a statement of the form, "if A then B". Consider the situation where A is a thing that is never true; for example 1=2. Then the statement becomes "if 1=2 then B". Now, at this point, I can substitute in anything I want for B, and the statement remains morally neutral; since one can never be equal to two.

Now, the statement given here was as follows: "If someone kills Cain, then that person will have vengeance laid against them sevenfold". Consider, then, that perhaps no-one killed Cain. Perhaps he died of pneumonia, or was attacked by a bear, or fell off a cliff, or drowned.

the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds

No, it simply refers to an evil state of being. It says nothing about what brought about that state. But it doesn't matter. The fact that it specifically calls out thoughts means that the Flood was at least partially retribution for thought crimes.

I don't see how it's possible to be in an evil state of being without at least seriously attempting to do evil deeds.

my moral intuition is closer to God's Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture

A Muslim would disagree with you.

I see I phrased my point poorly. Let me fix that. My moral intuition is closer to what is in the Bible than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture. While the theoretical Muslim and I may have some disagreements as to what extent the Bible is God's Word, I think we can agree on this rephrased point.

Have you considered the possibility that they might be right and you are wrong? It's just the luck of the draw that you happened to be born into a Christian household rather than a Muslim one. Maybe you got unlucky. How would you tell?

I have considered the possibility. My conclusion is that it would take pretty convincing evidence to persuade me of that, but it is not impossible that I am wrong.

But you keep dancing around the real question: Do you really believe that killing innocent bystanders can be morally justified? Or that genocide as a response to thought crimes can be morally justified? Or that forcing people to cannibalize their own children (Jeremiah 19:9) can be morally justified? Because that is the price of taking the Bible as your moral standard.

Are you familiar with the trolley problem? In short, it raises the question of whether or not it is a morally justifiable action to kill one innocent bystander in order to save five innocent bystanders.

...I take your point. If there had been Eden literalists back then, then that evidence alone would have been insufficient to convince them otherwise.

You are, of course, free to interpret literature however you like. But God was quite explicit about His thought process:

"Ge4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him."

That wasn't a thought process. That was spoken words; the intent behind those words was not given. What we're given here is an if-then - if anyone slays Cain, then that person will have vengeance taken upon him. It does not say whether or not the "if" is at all likely to happen, and may have been intended merely to calm Cain's irrational fear of the "if" part happening.

(I also can't help but wonder how you take sevenfold-vengeance on someone for murder. Do you kill them seven times? Kill them and six innocent bystanders?)

I think it's "kill them and six members of their clan/family", but I'm not sure.

You have lost the thread of the conversation. The Flood was a punishment for thought crimes (Ge6:5). The doing-nothing-but-evil theory was put forward by you as an attempt to reconcile this horrible atrocity with your own moral intuition:

I'd always understood the Flood story as they weren't just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren't even considering doing non-evil stuff.

Yes, and then we discussed the viability of continually doing evil, as it pertains to survival for more than one generation. You were sufficiently persuasive on the matter of cooperation for survival that I then weakened my stance from "continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren't even considering doing non-evil stuff" to "doing a whole lot of evil stuff a lot of the time".

In fact, looking at Genesis 6:5:

When the Lord saw how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time,

...it mentions two things. It mentions how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time. This is two separate things; the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds (with continuously evil thoughts only mentioned after the "and").

You seem to have run headlong into the fundamental problem with Christian theology: if we are inherently sinful, then our moral intuitions are necessarily unreliable, and hence you would expect there to be conflicts between our moral intuitions and God's Word as revealed by the Bible. You would expect to see things in the Bible that make you go, "Whoa, that doesn't seem right to me." At this point you must choose between the Bible and your moral intuitions.

But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing. My parents were Christian, and raised me in a Christian environment; I might therefore expect that my moral intuition is closer to God's Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture.

And, looking at human history, there most certainly have been cultures that regularly did things that I would find morally objectionable. In fact, there are still such cultures in existence today. Human cultures have, in the past, gone to such horrors as human sacrifice, cannibalism, and so on - things which my moral intuitions say are badly wrong, but which (presumably) someone raised in such a culture would have much less of a problem with.

No, I haven't actually calculated the odds. I wouldn't really have much of an idea how. (I could probably work it out on a basis of - if a gene has x% chance of preventing descendants as compared to not having that gene and a y% chance of being passed on to any descendants - and then do some overly-simplified calculations from the values of x and y - but I haven't, yet.)

Also remember that nothing is perfectly neutral. Even the banana man might get fed banana-cake by a dastardly enemy.

True, but his problem there isn't the banana gene. His problem there is that he has a dastardly enemy. If he didn't have the banana gene, the dastardly enemy could simply feed him arsenic cake instead, or just shoot him.

Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, "Wow, Cain, you're right, people are going to try to kill you, which is not an appropriate punishment for murder. Here, I'd better put this mark on your forehead to make sure people know not to kill you." (Funny how God was against the death penalty before he was for it.)

I read it as more along the lines of "No, nobody's going to kill you. Here, let me give you a magic feather just to calm you down."

How are they going to feed themselves? They wouldn't last one year without cooperating to hunt or grow crops. Survival in the wild is really, really hard.

...fair enough. Doesn't mean they weren't doing a lot of evil, though, even if they were occasionally cooperating.

An employee can convert a $1000 increase into a $1000 MIRI donation, but that requires the employee to get up and do something (i.e. log into his bank account and do a transfer). There's a chance for procrastination, laziness, and mental inertia to prevent that donation; employees who really want MIRI to get the donation might appreciate the company handling the actual getting up and doing it part (which the company can do rather more efficiently - making one big transfer instead of hundreds of little ones, with a corresponding decrease in both individual effort and bank fees).

Also, since we're talking potential employees, then it might be a strategic move by the company to more strongly attract potential employees who strongly value MIRI donations and reduce the company's attraction to potential employees who do not value MIRI donations.

In general, harmful mutations will die out. In order to spread to a significant proportion of the population, yes, a random mutation has to be lucky. It has to random-walk in a very rare way, and it is still more likely than not going to hit the gambler's ruin and be eventually eliminated from the population, even if it first spreads to 99% of said population (an extremely unlikely event).

But the thing about random-walking is that it is random. One wouldn't bet on a given harmful mutation spreading fast (not if one wanted to win the bet)... but if there are a million harmful mutations, then one of them could reasonably be expected to have one-in-a-million luck.