You know, you'd really think that in a thread with @Asyncritus and myself going at one another, the arrogance trophy would be a foregone conclusion. Hey, @GhostEcho? You are telling a former Catholic that his joke about what immaculate conception means for Mary's DNA is contradicted by an encyclica that you clearly don't understand, that happens to not even contradict the joke, and that in any case was written before the DNA was discovered that is the prop for said joke.
Did he? Because by hardening the heart of the Pharoh, he eliminated the possibility that Pharoh could change his mind before the moment that God wanted him to. One might compare the situation to someone hiring a personal trainer to help them to get fit. Because they know that they're going to lack the proper motivation to actually accomplish the goal. The problem is, however, that Pharoh didn't ask God to harden his heart, God just did it, because He "knew" that's what the Pharoh would have wanted. Imagine, if you will, that one day you mumble something about wanting to get into shape, and the next day Jack LaLanne is not only at your door, he's forcing you to do a bunch of exercises. You didn't ask him to help you, and the kinds of exercises he's making you do aren't necessarily the ones you had in mind. Sure, it might be better if you actually had a leg day, but is it right for him to make you have one? Show me where Pharoh asked God to harden his heart. Because without that, then your argument falls apart as God has acted without the consent of the Pharoh, thus eliminating free will. It's moot because there's no evidence showing any of the events described in Exodus (or other large portions of the Bible) actually happened. Zero. Zip. Nada. If you can't trust a key point in the Bible, then how can you trust the rest of it?
Fuck no, what has god done for me? Especially if I had a love and could possibly be killed because cheating for a woman was punishable by death. Plus, I am so poor I need to give birth in a stable? I am probably not in a financial position to raise god's child. Seriously, if god is not even going to get me a good room at the inn, some fucking healthcare, and a few bucks for my trouble so his kid isn't struggling, then fuck no. This is another area where I would totally go with the devil. At least you could make a contract with him and get somewhere. He wants a baby, let us talk. We could work out a deal for being the mother of your son. Given that I am providing womb space, I would probably keep my soul out of it. That is not to say I would not go to hell, but there are probably some comfortable places out of torment where I could hang for the use of my womb. I could get why people like the jesus part of god. He seems like he might be cool to hang with. But the other 2/3 of him seems to be an ass. Talk about your manic depressives.
I figured out the actual reason why this bugs me. It's the same logic as Believer: I believe that the Bible is divinely inspired to tell us about God. Atheist: See, I can't believe in any religion because I just can't believe humans can presume to understand an all-powerful all-wise being. Believer: . . . I just told you how. Through the Bible. Atheist: Yeah, but how can we invent a book that explains something of that magnitude? Believer: We. Didn't. Invent it. Atheist: I . . . don't understand those words apparently??
Except that it isn’t that an atheist doesn’t understand the concept of a higher being, they have no need. They look to science to understand the universe and understand that just because humans have not progressed enough to understand everything, they don’t exclude scientific explanations just because they don’t understand them. This is why trying to shame atheists doesn’t work.
I understand the words perfectly, and as I've already posted I was responding to the common premise used by many theists who assume anyone who doesn't believe deep down knows it's true but just doesn't want to listen.
Divine inspiration is invention. Thousands of years of human history show this to be true. The fucking bible was voted on in a committee, not through divine inspiration. Why should my morality be based on something voted on in a committee 1500 years ago? Why does my morality need to be based on any religious scripture?
The Bible is ambiguous at best on both of those particular sins, and I feel like that's a piece of evidence in favor of a moral system dictating religious beliefs. Killing and stealing are not black and white concepts. Sometimes, arguably, they're both morally justified actions. People know that, and it's reflected in the Bible's stances on these things (just for example). While organizing into societies, early humanity seems to have understood that killing and stealing at will was not a good recipe for social cohesion (but that warring on 'others' and looting their possessions was). I think that naturally, this moral code became enshrined in human religions--rather than passed down by a deity, which honestly seems rather self-evident to me. I don't think the Bible has anything new or particularly interesting to say about morality, though, at least until the New Testament. That's the break that I feel represents the 'reboot' of the old Jewish religion.
I see. In that case, I agree. Except the part about the New Testament. Are just highlighting the difference between the new and old? Or was there some specific moral behavior in the New Testament that isn’t inherently human?
Really? I'd say it's ambiguous or even permissive for slavery and rape, but theft and murder are pretty clearly on the list.
The Bible may have crossover with general principles of morality common among multiple societies, but the Bible also created moral restrictions above and beyond those (e.g., prohibiting tattoos, certain types of haircuts, growing more than one type of crop on your farm, wearing mixed fabric blends, interacting with menstruating women, etc.).
Ok, I do see your point. Unfortunately, those things are usually too big for the common list of crimes, and reserved for Anointed Kings, Saints, and the defendants at Nuremberg.
I don't know if that's true. Like literally, I don't know. Other societies of the time may have had the same or similar moral rules. It seems unlikely the Israelites were the only culture at the time prohibiting tattoos or certain types of haircuts. If moral practices and restrictions are at least partially the result of social pressures, other societies of the time surely had rules that were culturally specific. I don't know enough about the period to say for sure.
I mean, the parts of the Old Testament we're talking about (Leviticus especially) were purportedly laws derived from god. Sure, to a certain extent these were probably codifications of already existing morals or laws, much the same way that the first written secular laws were codifications of already existing laws and legal practices. But just like the secular laws developed and expanded beyond the broad strokes (e.g. don't kill, don't steal) to the more specific (e.g. differentiating between murder and manslaughter, differentiating between theft, robbery, and burglary, or even new categories of laws), I have no reason to believe that the books of the bible wouldn't follow a similar route (e.g. the 10 Commandments come from Exodus, which was written centuries before Leviticus containing oddly specific laws).
What religionists - particularly those who deny evolution - fail to recognize is that protohumans and their descendants (that would be us) survived collectively. No hunter went off on his own to kill a mastodon. Families were nested in kinship groups that were nested in tribes, and tribes survived by moral codes that, ideally, kept their members from bashing each other's heads in. Those moral codes evolved into religions which, in my view, were early man's science - an attempt to explain what caused lightning, forest fires, drought, floods, disease. When one tribe encountered another tribe, struggles over access to scarce resources led to bloodshed. Thus every slaughter from the myth of Cain and Abel to the present day.
Maybe. Maybe not. Many hunter cultures have a rite of passage or ritual involving a solo kill of dangerous prey. While I'm sure it was never a common practice, there were undoubtedly times when a hunter did indeed go off alone to bag some culturally significant prey animal. That said, one of the reasons that humans and wolves evolved a mutual fear/hatred was that we occupied the same niche and used much the same methods to hunt the same prey. That is to say, cooperative hunting parties using numbers to overwhelm large prey not otherwise accessible. Also, incidentally, helps explain why wolves became domesticated into dogs . . . early humans no doubt saw the benefit of using the wolf's superior natural abilities to their own benefit. And that is enough for this particular digression, I reckon.
I'll let you folks argue of this piece which seems relevant to this discussion. More at the link, but the gist of the piece is that as a society finds itself to be more economically stable and things like life-expectancy increase, the number of religious people within that society start to decline. In some cases dramatically.
Sorry, I've had a few very busy days here, and didn't have much time for Wordforge... In answer to your question, it is a mixture of things. If I simply took the Bible at face value, with no room for figures of speech or anthropomorphisms or the influence of a different culture, how I interpret the Bible would depend on which passages I select. You can find as many "God is love" passages as you want, just as you can find as many "wrath of God" passages as you want. Which ones you choose to accept as true depends to a great extent on your preconceptions. But since some of them come in close proximity to each other, from the same writer, it is kind of difficult to just dismiss one group of passages or the other. Honesty requires one to at least admit the possiblity that they are all true, even though they are not all to be taken in strictly literal terms. (But no one, in any culture, ever expresses himself only in strictly literal terms, so there is no reason to suppose the Biblical writers did.) I freely admit my experiences, as well as my reasoning about how God must be if he exists, all influence how I read the Bible. I think anyone who is honest has to say the same thing, even someone who defends a position that is totally incompatible with my own. But when you also have Biblical passages that show very clearly that God does not want to punish wrongdoers (such as 1 John 4, which I mentioned in my post), you can't say that it is just experience and reason that influence my understanding of the Bible. It is also my understanding of the Bible that influences how I reason.
But anyone who believes what the Bible says has to admit that knowledge of Jesus is not necessary for salvation. The Bible, including the New Testament writers who are unabashed promoters of Jesus, clearly admits that Abraham was saved, for example, yet he had no knowledge of Jesus. What the Bible actually says is that all salavation is based, from the divine point of view, on the sufficiency of the sacrifice of Christ, not that the person has to know about it. God could just as well have had Christ pay the price at the very end of human history, and that would change very little, other than there being more people who don't know as much about the mechanism of how a holy God can overlook sin. (And let's not fool ourselves; even those of us who live after Christ and take the Bible very seriously don't understand everything about that mechanism, either. We merely know a bit more about it than those who lived before Christ.)
Actually, if you look at the whole of human history, they have relatively little to do with each other. An awful lot of ancient religions, and even some more modern ones, have little to say about morality. It is only those who have grown up in cultures with a very long history of Judaism, Christianity or Islam who tend to think that religion and morality go hand in hand. My take on it is that religion is a human invention, the result of people "creating God in their own image", and imagining what they would like to receive, then thinking that if they give that to God (or the gods, or whatever way you conceive the divine), he would somehow be more disposed to give them good things. So they pray, praise, bow down, give money, make sacrifices, or whatever, in order to earn divine favour. As surprising as my outlook is to many people, I take a very dim view of religion. I am probably almost as negative about religion as some of the most virulent anti-theists here. The big difference is that, to me, being anti-religion is not the same thing as being anti-God. As I have said other times, religion (I grew up with it) didn't give me answers, and just made me feel guilty and afraid of hell. But when I discovered what it means to live a personal relationship with God, that changed my life completely. And I don't think religion, or even a specific belief in God, is necessary to have a high view of morality. K. and RickDeckard both defend moral values that are actually extremely close to my own.
