Discussion on the difference in morality/ethics of different types and subtypes of religion, including agnositic/atheism. This includes both the literal teachings of that religion, and the general culture that persists because of/inspite of those teachings.
The one clue to what might have happened is that all of my North Carolina family, especially the old old ones when I was a child, *hated* Baptists. So I'm guessing a doctrinal split in the congregation.
Pre-Destination is a big issue, but not one you'd hear about in Sunday School. In fact, if the minister was not sophisticated, you might not hear it discussed at all, if he could avoid it. It's a hard topic for people to hear.
Those dratted Baptists! 
And the Southern Baptist convention doesn't move pastors around like United Methodists tend to do, so I had the same pastor for years and years, practically the entire time I was in that church, so whatever he didn't talk about, or I didn't pay attention to, I wouldn't have heard if I wasn't interested enough to look it up on my own.
There's an awful lot of very technical Christian talk in here. Not a lot on actual morality.
In the United States (at least, if not other countries as well) we've got some heavy moral problems on our hands. We have a president who won't stand up and say that white supremacists are bad (and if he does, he backtracks on it as quickly as he can). His entire agenda seems to be focused on undoing as much of the last (black) president's work as he can. We've got a group of liberal activists who are being painted as racist against white people, and somehow media outlets are managing to pump out copious opinion pieces on how people opposed to white supremacy are just as bad as white supremacists. We've got a crop of moderates with no stakes in either side of the argument sitting in the middle, like
and scenes like this playing out in the Oval Office:
along with a strong, white, evangelical contingent defending him, which manages to snag moderate Christians along with them quite a bit more often than anyone should be comfortable with.
We've got a man who has a house that looks like this:
And a church that looks like this:
taking literal days to open the doors to hurricane victims needing shelter, and people who make less money in five years than he makes in a couple weeks defending him. Contrast him to this guy:
who doesn't preach any message, who doesn't have nearly the resources available to him that Joel Osteen does to recover from the damage and wear that his establishment and products will sustain simply by deciding to help people. Contrast his emotion over encountering a single human being in need of shelter in a hard time, to Osteen's clear discomfort with storm refugees dirtying up his church.
Consider that we have people with large audiences who say things like, it's more likely that Houston suffered from Harvey because it had a lesbian mayor than because of climate change.
No group is the moral gold-standard. We've got self-proclaimed skeptics trying to pass off the idea that a shitty paper about the "conceptual penis" being accepted by a no-name pay-to-play "scientific journal" somehow completely invalidates gender studies as a concept. The same skeptics are largely transphobic and misogynist, as well.
Morality isn't easy, but religion takes the cake for making morality harder than it has to be. There's a not-insignificant amount of Christians who have a really hard time with the biblical idea that women are not permitted to teach or speak. That it is biblical that I, and everyone who is a pro-LGBT ally, deserve death. That the new testament commands slaves to submit themselves to their masters, and that the old testament contains many, many chapters which entirely entail instructions on how to be a slave owner. That the favorite monument of Christians to install on goverment property, the Ten Commandments, fails to mention quite a few tremendous tenets of morality. These Christians have such difficulty with this because our society has a decent helping of secular morality, and secular morality has surpassed religious morality on these kinds of points.
And then we've got a forum member whose contention is that religion doesn't make people do bad things, but more likely simply serves as a justification for people who already want to do them (and as far as I can tell, is saying this as though it is somehow in defense of religion). Religions have been a shield for poor moral choices as often as they have been the cause of them. For example, there is no context under which you could convince me to take hold of a venemous snake, and dance around with it, if you hadn't already convinced me that some kind of means exists that protects me from a clearly dangerous animal. The capacity for human delusion to extend from such obviously ridiculous and extreme circumstances to more mundane circumstances is limitless - see religious parents of gay children who believe expelling their child from their family is the right thing to do, or that life-saving blood transfusions are instant damnations.
When it becomes clear that secular morality has invalidated much of what religion calls morality, one of two things happens - the religious do some impressive mental gymnastics to get to a place where they can justify these things ("Slavery in biblical times was more like indentured servitude - it wasn't as bad"), or the religious become the non-religious.
Unfortunately, fear of death, and a desire for an afterlife are powerful motivators for mental gymnastics.
NSMike,
It's important to identify the key points of a problem. I feel like you did a great job of that in your post.
So my next thought is, "How can I help to make things better." I know that I can't single handedly fix the myriad problems that you've outlined in your post.
I feel like the best thing I can do is to be a living example of modern morality. So, I do my part as best as I can. But it's such a small movement in the right direction.
NSMike, thank you for your post.
I grew up in a Pentecostal church of all things. They taught (literal) fire and brimstone, that we in the church were fortunate to be "saved" and that all those who weren't part of their specific Jesus club (especially the Catholics!) would spend an agonizing eternity burning in hell while they were eaten by worms. And this wasn't met as metaphor. I remember being a child and watching movies showing depictions of people being eaten by maggots. Gays were sinful and of the devil. And women were to be subservient to men in all things.
I never could quite get the speaking in tongues thing down so was a bit worried that I was going to burn in hell. I went to the alter calls and wept repentful tears and was baptized several times (didn't seem to take because I still couldn't speak in tongues but I did have "stammering lips" once which was really because I was pretty cold). And I really believed that I was a pitiful sinful husk but could avoid being destroyed if I repented all my sins.
It took me a long time to unshackle myself from some of the things I was taught. Even entering college I thought gays were some sort of sinful abomination. My relatives were very concerned that I was studying science and that I might start to believe in all of that evolution nonsense. I took some (mandatory) religion classes and learned that the Bible was actually a document written by humans. I thought that it was either written by the hand of God or at least the divine whispered the words into the ears of the authors. And I learned that there was an actual historic context to the document and that maybe not all of it should be literally applied to modern society.
Over time I became increasingly disenfranchised with what I was hearing on Sundays. I grew weary of the words of love but acts of intolerance and judgement. I asked our pastor, "do we really believe that some kid born and raised in the Middle East is destined to an eternity of damnation because he didn't convert to Christianity?" And I was instructed that a) all people will have had an opportunity to come to Christ and if they blow it, to hell with them (pun intended) and b) good Christians don't ask questions like this.
So fast forward to now and Christianity (or any organized religion) no longer fits my world view. In fact, I think their overall teachings are a major cause of the moral crisis our society is currently in. I don't agree with the concept that only those who believe in some higher being can lead a moral life. I don't want to derail this conversation but one of the struggles I now have is what to teach my children. My wife remains attached to the rituals of the church although she too largely rejects many of the teachings. But she thinks it's important for our children to be involved from a social standpoint so they are going through confirmation at our local Lutheran church. The reality is that it is still not socially acceptable to not be a "good Christian" and we continue to very much live in a cultural theocracy. But that would probably be a better discussion for a different thread (we used to have one for atheists/agnostics but I think it died off).
Looking at the original scope of discussion, I don't think there's a single thing in your post that counts as derailing, Docjoe.
Discussion on the difference in morality/ethics of different types and subtypes of religion, including agnositic/atheism. This includes both the literal teachings of that religion, and the general culture that persists because of/inspite of those teachings.
Keep on posting. 
DocJoe, at least with the Lutherans they have a specific expectation of accredited advanced education for priests. I think there's a connection between the lack of that tradition in evangelical churches and the antagonism toward education.
To dig into the question of orthopraxy vs. ethical action, there's a pretty good, deep overview from an philosophical ethics point of view here: http://www.iep.utm.edu/divine-c/
The thing that brought me there was thinking about the difference between ethical and theological assessment as discussed by Kierkegaard in Fear & Trembling where he looks at Abraham being told to kill his own son. Kierkegaard tends toward seeing Abraham as choosing the apparently correct "religious" response over the apparently correct "ethical" action, but (as I remember it) also at least postulates that Abraham remembered God's promise that about the uncountable number of his descendents, and reasoned that God was going to do something such that his son wouldn't ultimately be dead.
What sets Abraham apart among OT heroes is, in part, what's referred to as his "faith." The patriarchs otherwise have a record of physically, intellectually and verbally wrestling with God. Abraham is one of the few who might have been acting out of blind obedience.
Note: I'm not trying to argue a historical veracity to these stories, but rather about the way that they function as myths, establishing and reinforcing values in their cultures.
...postulates that Abraham remembered God's promise that about the uncountable number of his descendants, and reasoned that God was going to do something such that his son wouldn't ultimately be dead.
It is, perhaps, not unreasonable to assume he might come to something like this conclusion, but, if we're to step into the mind of Abraham in this way, we must also consider that his thought process might have been something along the lines of, "God gave me one son, and now he's asking me to sacrifice him, so even though I will lose Isaac, I'll probably just get another son after him, who will father my descendants."
I would also consider that a god who would ask for such a sacrifice is horrible enough to have been lying to Abraham in the first place.
Additionally, Abraham's willingness to go through with the sacrifice, and usefulness as an example of a truly faithful servant, is considerably diminished by the idea that he's smirking off to the side and thinking, "Ha, I got you in a logical circle, bro, because you totes told me I'd have countless descendants."
DocJoe, at least with the Lutherans they have a specific expectation of accredited advanced education for priests. I think there's a connection between the lack of that tradition in evangelical churches and the antagonism toward education.
Pentacostals can seem a bit out-of-the-ordinary in some respects (and I'm sorry you went through so much awfulness, DocJoe), but most mainstream Christian denominations are not opposed to education and do strongly support it in many cases. At least when I visit a mainstream church of some denomination, I know what they're about concerning doctrine and the qualifications of their church leadership.
With Evangelical churches, you could be getting anything, and because many are very personality-driven and use a lot of trendy corporate marketing to make it all seem so very exciting, you may not notice that there may a number of very questionable aspects to the organization until you're already deep in it. They take a lot of pride in being independent and non-mainstream because they claim that they are more "bible based" and authentic than other churches who have become "too liberal" or who have gotten lukewarm, and on the surface at least, it may appear to be that way. They are extremely loud and vocal, and most especially, political.
I would never claim that they aren't Christians because only God knows people's hearts, but oftentimes they tend to not be very *loving* Christians, at least outside of their own internal groups. Gotten into arguments with various conservative Evangelicals a number of times over "love they neighbor as yourself" and I was informed that "neighbors" was defined as only other Christians, so anyone else didn't matter because they had the chance to be saved and rejected it, so until and if they do make that choice, we don't have to concern ourselves with their welfare. (Except for they probably didn't use the word "welfare"...that only seems to come up when arguing about government entitlements. )
There are a lot of fun things to argue about Abraham and some of his antics. He's definitely not a person without issues.
So far as the Isaac story goes, I view it mostly as a question of faith. Is Abraham (or ultimately all of us) willing to put God first in his life, even above the son which he most loves of everything else in the world? Does he have the faith to truly trust in God's good character even when it comes to doing something that appears horrible, irrational, or contradictory? Would we also be willing to sacrifice everything to put God first?
It is similar to Jesus's story of the rich young man in Matthew 19:
20 The young man said to him, “I have kept all these; what do I still lack?” 21 Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 22 When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.
This particular young man was putting his riches first, but unlike Abraham, was not willing to put God first in his life. It may be something different for others. While God may not actually require us to give up all of these things, he requires us to be willing to do so as a part of putting him first in our lives.
Abraham is something of an ultimate (and extreme) example of this sort of faith.
I've been going to a Universalist Unitarian Church for the past few months. Their main philosophy is to be open and accepting to everyone. The Reverend is openly gay. So it's completely progressive.
I'm an atheist, and they even accept me. I've already met three other atheists who are members of the church. I feel at home and very comfortable there. That in itself is HUGE for me.
Docjoe, I'm in a similar moral position as you. I settled with enrolling my boy into weekly Catholic Scripture class at school; my logic was that even if he decides not to be a practicing Catholic at least he will understand how Catholics (and this may be a stretch, also understand Christianity and other faiths) "works", think and react to events. Sort of like training situational awareness.
It's a bit of a pity but our schools offer an alternative ethics class (entirely secular) but the teaching materials and teachers are pretty lax. So for now I'm keeping an eye on his moral growth and assessing whether Scripture starts to move into sermonising territory rather than the general love thy neighbour lessons the young kids tend to receive.
Note: I think the following spiel is on topic, but it may end up kind of ranty/steam of thought.
My wife and I came from Catholic families (suburban Chicago, as it seems our Catholicism is way different from a lot of other versions I've read about or watched). I am now flat out atheist and my wife is spiritual-agnostic (she may term it differently, but at least non-Christian). Both of us had 12 years of Catholic school, we even got married in the Church since I wanted to make my grandmother happy.
We have a 6 year old (1st grade) and 4 year old (pre-K) and raising them without direct religion (no baptism), but explain it to them when it is brought up. We've let them go to church with their grandparents a couple of times.
All of this background is to setup how I think we are handling the kids moral/ethical upbringing. We spend alot of time with the kids working on the why you should be good and think of others instead. This is, luckily, reinforced in their schools (both secular) and the activities we have them in (mainly sports in our case).
My parents especially are still actively Catholic and less than pleased that their grandkids are not baptized. While a pain, I think their disapproval and questioning of our decisions (of which my father will do at great length and with little provocation) has really pushed us to more critical develop the why and how we are teaching our children.
I don't regret my upbringing, especially since there was a focus from the Jesuit portion of Catholicism influencing my learning, but after reflection I think I see where there were the flaws and where I can hopefully do better.
I'd like to point out that religion does not have a monopoly on morality.
I'd like to point out that religion does not have a monopoly on morality.
Very much agreed.
Much of my upbringing disagrees, so I was attempting to step through how I (and my wife) are separating from that view.
So far as the Isaac story goes, I view it mostly as a question of faith. Is Abraham (or ultimately all of us) willing to put God first in his life, even above the son which he most loves of everything else in the world? Does he have the faith to truly trust in God's good character even when it comes to doing something that appears horrible, irrational, or contradictory? Would we also be willing to sacrifice everything to put God first?
Since we're talking about morality in this thread, let's examine these questions.
A being that claims to be a god with moral superiority asks me to murder my child, which I presumably love more than anything else (I am not a parent, but the idea that parents imprint on their children like this is fairly well corroborated), specifically because they command it with no other reasoning. It demands blind trust and obedience and commands me to commit a truly horrendous, irrational or contradictory act. It demands that I am willing to sacrifice everything for it above all else in my life.
Give me some reasons that I should do this, and not the convenient, "His ways are higher than ours," or "God works in mysterious ways," nonsense that is a complete non-answer. Abraham may have had stronger faith, but I'm sitting here reading about a god who demands this kind of loyalty from his subjects essentially f*cking with a guy by telling him to murder his own son. And if you look back at the whole story, that has even more meaning when you think about how Abraham & Sarah had wanted a child, but they never managed to have one, assumed Sarah was infertile, and were essentially grieving this fact. I realize a faithful person would look at that and think how much greater Abraham's willingness is because of all of that, but I just see a god who is a dick.
It's pretty difficult to reconcile this god as the supposed loving father Christianity proclaims, and even harder when you try to reconcile "loving father" and and eternal damnation.
bekkilyn wrote:So far as the Isaac story goes, I view it mostly as a question of faith. Is Abraham (or ultimately all of us) willing to put God first in his life, even above the son which he most loves of everything else in the world? Does he have the faith to truly trust in God's good character even when it comes to doing something that appears horrible, irrational, or contradictory? Would we also be willing to sacrifice everything to put God first?
Since we're talking about morality in this thread, let's examine these questions.
A being that claims to be a god with moral superiority asks me to murder my child, which I presumably love more than anything else (I am not a parent, but the idea that parents imprint on their children like this is fairly well corroborated), specifically because they command it with no other reasoning. It demands blind trust and obedience and commands me to commit a truly horrendous, irrational or contradictory act. It demands that I am willing to sacrifice everything for it above all else in my life.
Give me some reasons that I should do this, and not the convenient, "His ways are higher than ours," or "God works in mysterious ways," nonsense that is a complete non-answer. Abraham may have had stronger faith, but I'm sitting here reading about a god who demands this kind of loyalty from his subjects essentially f*cking with a guy by telling him to murder his own son. And if you look back at the whole story, that has even more meaning when you think about how Abraham & Sarah had wanted a child, but they never managed to have one, assumed Sarah was infertile, and were essentially grieving this fact. I realize a faithful person would look at that and think how much greater Abraham's willingness is because of all of that, but I just see a god who is a dick.
It's pretty difficult to reconcile this god as the supposed loving father Christianity proclaims, and even harder when you try to reconcile "loving father" and and eternal damnation.
What's also interesting about this Abraham and Isaac story is that there is some thought that Isaac wasn't a little boy at the time, but a young man even as old as 20+ years old. He had to be strong enough to carry the sticks to be used for his own sacrifice, so would a small boy have been able to do that? Also, if he was a young man and he didn't feel he wanted to go along with this idea, couldn't he have just overpowered his 100+ year old father and not allowed him to do it? So it seems that perhaps Isaac was himself agreeable to this whole thing as well as Abraham and would have had some choice in the matter, even if it was just through physical resistance.
I believe the Muslim view of this story does have the son as a willing participant and even went farther in that the son didn't even need to be bound to the altar at all once Abraham's vision was explained.
I think at least part of an explanation as to why Abraham was so willing to have faith in this matter is because Abraham already had a relationship with God. He knew God's character. God wasn't just some random deity suddenly speaking to him and demanding his son. God was already in his heart, and it seems already in Isaac's heart as well. Abraham had faith that God would keep his promise, and it wasn't a promise about some other son that would replace Isaac if the sacrifice had been carried out...it was a promise concerning Isaac himself. "It is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you."
There is also some parallel here to Jesus's sacrifice on the cross.
I think there's a connection between the lack of that tradition in evangelical churches and the antagonism toward education.
This actually goes back to the founding of Protestantism, and has been an active social influence continuously since then. Just look at the vast variety of sects and beliefs in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, to see something like what we see today. Anti-intellectualism was an important part of the rejection of organized Christian churches, and also played a major role in long-running conflicts like the English Civil War. It is part of the theme of the rejection of established authorities that runs through the backbone of the Reformation and Protestantism.
The worst you can say is that we're seeing a resurgence of it today. It's not new. It's endemic to the core of the religion.
It's pretty difficult to reconcile this god as the supposed loving father Christianity proclaims, and even harder when you try to reconcile "loving father" and and eternal damnation.
That's in part because there *was* no "eternal damnation" in Judaism. And the depiction of the God of Abraham is bloody, jealous, and vengeful to his enemies, as well as kind, loving and nurturing to his "Chosen". And how did one become "clean" and demonstrate adherence? By ritually killing animals and even people (as can be seen in other religions of the period - Judaism is progressive in part for this time because it did not practice *human* sacrifice for the most part (remember that slaughter of the tribes by the Levites?). But slavery, patriarchy, belief in spirits influencing everything and everyone, and even literal magic associated with religion... This is very much Bronze Age tribal thinking.
In general, we've moved past that (even at the time of the late Roman Empire, great Christian thinkers were trying to reconcile this stuff with what is implicitly the changes in societies and moral codes around them. So this problem of reconciliation of what we witness every day, what we aspire to, based on thousands of additional years of human growth, with what we read in ossified Bronze Age texts, shows us how far we've come, and strongly indicates to me that holding on to these documents, rather than our ideals, is holding us back, not moving us forward.
This is part of why I think we need to detach religion from morality (politics and public policy are also major elements in this). Literalism especially is the enemy of all that is good.
So this problem of reconciliation of what we witness every day, what we aspire to, based on thousands of additional years of human growth, with what we read in ossified Bronze Age texts, shows us how far we've come...
In my view, we haven't come very far at all. As much as things have changed, they have remained the same. Humans are still as vengeful, murderous, bigoted, hateful, etc. as ever. While institutionalized religions have played a part, they aren't the only reasons for it...just one of many motives humans have used to oppress each other. We have come quite far in many ways when it comes to technology, and technology has become a great equalizer between the stronger and the weaker; however, technology hasn't taken away the underlying greed and selfishness inherent in our natures. There has been no progress at all there.
Moving away from the whole Abraham and related thing for a moment, a guy in a Spiritual Gifts class I'm currently taking through my church conference mentioned something called "Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome" that he got from a book he read by the same title (he was a Catholic school survivor):
I've had my own share of church trauma and exploration over the years, so I hope to be able to fit in this book among the 10+ other things I'm attempting to read all at once.
I find it hard to accept that we have not come that far. Look at the story in question, Genesis 22. In it, Abraham has servants (slaves quite possibly) who have to follow him around to do things for him, presumably for free. In the chapter before, his wife is upset because Abraham has (legally) had a son with her slave woman. God literally speaks to people and commands them to do things, and they listen and obey literally. And why is Abraham going to Mount Moriah? To make a "burnt offering" of a living being; his release of Isaac from the obligation is only possible because a ram is caught nearby and can be used instead.
That's a vastly different culture than we have today, but we still purport to get meaning out of it *without* really getting the context. We rewrite it constantly, and understand it in many different ways. Talk about building houses on sand! We accept what we feel is "the lesson", but we no longer accept the other things that Abraham took for granted, even though they are perfectly acceptable to God in the books. And He never comes out and explains that they are bad; that's key. It's humans who have figured out that a lot of this stuff is just wrong, without God's guidance being necessary (and, to my point, in the face of resistance from many religion authorities who used Christianity as a justification for things like slavery, the Divine Right of Kings and many other things we now reject).
It's terribly short-sighted to argue that we have not gotten *better* in how we treat people overall in the last several thousand years. It also contradicts what we know from studies of behavior that show that, contrary to expectations, most people are *not* routinely greedy and selfish. It should be self-evident that that is true, since society continues to function and has for hundreds of thousands of years. But Christianity demands that we be broken in a way only God can fix, so it's common wisdom still that we have not improved one bit over time.
Heck, even the idea that God speaks directly to people is now regarded as delusional. And we do understand many natural mechanisms that can cause that, cognitive and structural and chemical, and we even have pills that can prevent that kind of hallucination. We allow people who commit crimes guided by the voice of God in their head to be medicated and treated instead of burned or stoned.
Which of course begs the question - if God's Law is so good for us, why *haven't* we improved, if you think we haven't? If God's moral advice and a religious system that has overwhelmingly controlled society for millennia has *not* resulted in improvements, just why do we think it's even useful? Why cling to something that produces no useful results for society?
The fact is, humanity is constantly improving and failing, but it tends to improve over time, and the reasons for that are based on evolutionary necessities. If we don't cooperate as the norm, if we don't generally resist greed and selfishness, then over time, society fails and we all suffer. This is a far simpler explanation and it fits the facts better. It's also explanatory of history as a whole.
Our systems of government are generally better than those of the Iron and Bronze Ages when the Abrahamic religions came of age. Individuals have more protection under the law in most countries. Education is far more wide-spread and goes further than at any time in the past. We have laws that govern the conduct of nations towards each other, not just citizens. And as a norm, countries are more tolerant and accepting of other nationalities and their cultures. Intolerance at the national level is now the exception rather than the rule. None of these is the direct result of technology.
The facile idea that we have not improved at all since Biblical days cannot stand against the evidence, even when technology is removed from the equation. Now, if that is something you can accept, you can argue that God is in part responsible; maybe he's raised us up. But that removes the ability to argue that we're all so broken that nothing has changed in our morality. And that's a contradiction that is difficult to get around with platitudes and 3000 year old "wisdom" on the nature of people.
Either we've learned from God and things have improved (without, of course, any input from God on the improvements, and against his Word in many cases); or the whole idea that we're better off on the whole is a fantasy. All you have to do to accept that is to reject the last few thousand years of history and philosophy and legal/governance systems, because the evidence is clear.
So what happens to people when the technology, laws, and social structures are removed, or when people believe they are above the laws, or that they don't need to heed constructed social norms?
We have Charlottesville, school shootings, GamerGate, home invasions, rapes, concentration camps and ethnic cleansing, police brutality, and the list goes on. And do you think that there wouldn't be people bringing back slavery and human sacrifices if they felt they had opportunity? The South will rise again, right?
Well, we haven't exactly gotten rid of slavery. We have young women being kidnapped in various areas and sold into sexual slavery even today, and which happens to have nothing to do with religion.
While it's true we may be able to construct social structures and governments at times that work better for the common good, there are always others trying their best to tear them down for their own profit, power, or advantage. Wars over oil. Unfettered destruction of our natural resources, animal poaching for trinkets and exotic souvenirs....can't blame all of these things on religion.
This basic human nature hasn't changed even if we sometimes manage to keep a veneer of civilization over it all.
Does this mean that we shouldn't try to make things better for the common good? Of course not, but if it was in our nature to be entirely unselfish and morally perfect in every way, we wouldn't need laws or any sort of social or governmental structures to regulate behavior since we would always do the right things by default.
You're right, we can't blame all of that on religion. But in all of that, in all of your scenarios where bad things happen, I can't find a positive role for it, either.
What is the solution for Charlottesville? There's nothing in the Bible denouncing white supremacy, and there's plenty, plenty in support of ethnic supremacy. The Bible paints the Jewish god as the ultimate ethnic cleanser.
School shootings? Doing violence against those who have wronged you is a primary tenet of the Old Testament god.
GamerGate? The Bible is a textbook on patriarchy.
Slavery? As I said in one of my earlier posts, the New Testament, which is what most Christians pay attention to, if they read any of the Bible, tells slaves to be obedient to their masters, and the Old Testament is full of rules about how to be a slave owner.
On top of all of that - ALL of it - with 2000 years of Christian history under our belts, it is only now that the world is quantifiably less violent than it ever has been. We live in a time of unprecedented peace. I know there's a lot of horrible shit still out there, but what we've accomplished with modern human society and secular morality is unparalleled in all of recorded history.
We don't have good solutions for everything, and we still have a lot of work to accomplish. And yes, if the world were suddenly turned on its head and survival pressures reintroduced, a lot of what we consider common morality would go by the wayside. It's a favorite subject of modern film and literature in the form of post-apocalyptic fiction.
But if there's anything in the Bible that would give us solutions for those problems that still persist, we sure haven't found it, even after all this time. The Bible and Christianity specifically tell us this life is just a waiting room for the next one, and oh well, human suffering is just part of that equation. F*ck you, Bible. I want something better, and I don't think we're not smart enough to make it happen.
NSMike, let me address some of those things. There is a lot of patriarchy and terrible things in the Old Testament, it is true. I don't think anyone can seriously deny it. However, I view it as one overarching story of hope and redemption. While Israel is God's chosen people, it is not because they are *ethnically* purer than the other nations surrounding them, but it is because it will be out of one of their tribes, Judah, that the Messiah will arise, which is all part of God's plan to redeem the entire human race from its fallen state that originated back in the Eden stories.
Hebrew society was not perfect by any means. They had a system of patriarchy and slavery and set up hierarchies and kings, which God allowed because humans still have free will. Many people believe that since certain social structures exist in the bible, that they are the ideal social structures we *should* have, and that's just not true.
People are still going to be people, but God is working his plan through people ultimately for the benefit of all, not just the chosen who will produce Messiah, which Christians believe was Jesus.
Yes, Paul in the New Testament tells slaves to be obedient to their masters, but in order to understand Paul's message, it needs to be in the appropriate context. Many parts of Paul's letters have been cherry-picked out and misused. Paul's overall mission was to spread the gospel, the good news of Jesus's redemption for all people, Jews and Gentiles alike. Secondly, his message was about *mutual* submission, that ALL Christians were to put the needs of others before their own, to be servants of one another, like Jesus did. He also wrote that "there is no male or female, Jew or Gentile, or master and slave in Christ Jesus."
Paul didn't didn't necessarily *approve* of the pagan Greco-Roman social structure that promoted slavery, but he recognized that in order to make more converts to *freedom* in Christ, then Christians also needed to be examples to unbelievers, that slaves may be able to convert their masters, woman their unbelieving husbands, children their parents, etc. Then all could ultimately be free and equal in Christ.
His goal wasn't to get all political and disrupt or tear down the current government, but to help Christians live within whatever existed at the time, and fulfill the great commission of spreading the good news and making disciples.
But ALL are to submit and be subject to each other. Paul's egalitarianism was very radical thinking at the time. (And apparently still radical today, unfortunately.)
Lots of people seem to miss this message though when they are picking out things like men having long hair or women not wearing gold strands in their hair, that really only applied to specific situations within the church that Paul was addressing.
God's plan of redemption through Jesus, who fulfilled the laws of the old covenant, is that those who accept Jesus as Lord and Savior through faith will be filled with God's Holy Spirit and be transformed and produce the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control rather than craving the things of their old nature. They will become "born again" in spirit. At this point, the old nature is not completely gone and the Enemy of this world still works his corruption, but the promise and the great hope is Jesus will be coming again in final victory that will complete the work that was started in the beginning and we will finally and completely wiped free of our sinful state and be fully reconciled to God and holy and pure to be able to stand in his presence. (God *wants* this to happen, but he simply cannot abide being in the presence of sin.)
Now there are those who believe that once they have accepted Jesus, then they can just go and do all the horrible and hateful things they want to other people and to the world because they are already "saved" and Jesus is going to come and destroy the world anyway.
Not so!
If we truly have faith and the Holy Spirit, we should also be producing good fruit mentioned above, and following Jesus' commandments of loving God and loving our neighbor, and if we are not doing these things, then the question arises if we really have the faith. Only God knows our hearts, but when I see people out there doing hateful things to other people in the name of Jesus, it tends to make me quite upset because I feel that they have completely missed the entire message.
Also, this idea that every single word in the bible has to be completely inerrant, historically true, and never contradictory is a relatively new one. The bible doesn't need to be a science or history textbook. When we focus on these things, we miss the forest for the trees.
There is a lot of positive that comes from religion BUT usually not when people insist on mixing religion into politics. That tends to corrupt both the religion and the politics. Instead, keeping separation of church and state strengthens both.
Reading Christians talk about the Torah is more than a little infuriating.
So what happens to people when the technology, laws, and social structures are removed, or when people believe they are above the laws, or that they don't need to heed constructed social norms?
Why are you pitching some theoretical return to a so-called natural state? I mean ever since hunter-gather tribes realized that staying put, growing crops, and building cities was easier/better there really hasn't been a moment where technology, laws, and social structures were removed. Hell, even hunter-gather tribes had to have technology, laws, and social structures.
I mean maybe you could say that modern wars or conflict zones are kinda that natural state, but even then there are nation states or organized groups who are behind the fighting. And then there are other groups--the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, etc.--trying to minimize the suffering of the civilians trapped inside the fighting.
We have Charlottesville, school shootings, GamerGate, home invasions, rapes, concentration camps and ethnic cleansing, police brutality, and the list goes on. And do you think that there wouldn't be people bringing back slavery and human sacrifices if they felt they had opportunity? The South will rise again, right?
But they don't really have the opportunity, do they? Because society wouldn't tolerate bringing back slavery and human sacrifice.
One thing I do know, however, is that if all of society collapsed it would be the fervently religious who would be the ones leading the charge to bring back things like human sacrifice and using god to justify enslaving others. That's because they did it before.
Well, we haven't exactly gotten rid of slavery. We have young women being kidnapped in various areas and sold into sexual slavery even today, and which happens to have nothing to do with religion.
We haven't. There are still some 48 million people in some form of slavery.
But there really also isn't a place on the planet anymore where slavery is legal, broadly viewed as socially acceptable, and where the central government (if it's strong enough) doesn't crack down on it.
That's a far cry from the prevalent, god-approved view of slavery seen in the Bible.
While it's true we may be able to construct social structures and governments at times that work better for the common good, there are always others trying their best to tear them down for their own profit, power, or advantage. Wars over oil. Unfettered destruction of our natural resources, animal poaching for trinkets and exotic souvenirs....can't blame all of these things on religion.
This basic human nature hasn't changed even if we sometimes manage to keep a veneer of civilization over it all.
Basic human nature is that we're evolved to function in a smallish clan/tribe where we know everyone, where any human not from our clan/tribe is very likely hostile and dangerous, and where you'll probably die quickly if you don't pay attention to things like the tiger hiding in the foliage. That's how we lived for tens of thousands of years.
Civilization is something that's new to us as a species. Living in large cities is new to us. Being surrounded by loads and loads of strangers is new to us. Having to deal with long-term problems (some of our own creation) where failure doesn't immediately mean we die is new to us.
Yet, despite that, humanity has managed to grow from a population of a few million to seven billion and change in just 12,000 years. And we've managed to cooperate enough to develop the science and technology that helps lots of us live longer, better lives than our ancestors.
That some people fall back on the old ways--putting people they view as part of their clan/tribe/gang/family before others--shouldn't be surprising. Again, evolutionarily and socially humans are still very new to this whole thing.
I don't view those as being the fault of religion. Although religion does heavily emphasize "othering" and couples it with powerful social feedback that your group is right/moral/going to heaven and the others are bad/evil/going to hell.
I also don't view civilization as a veneer that covers up much baser human instincts. That still reeks too much of the idea religious people won't rape, kill, steal, and enslave others only because there's a deity that will punish them if they do.
Does this mean that we shouldn't try to make things better for the common good? Of course not, but if it was in our nature to be entirely unselfish and morally perfect in every way, we wouldn't need laws or any sort of social or governmental structures to regulate behavior since we would always do the right things by default.
But I'm not looking for others to be entirely unselfish and morally perfect in everyway. That's very unrealistic expectation.
What we need is herd immunity levels of unselfishness. Enough people have to realize that they need to cooperate with others most of the time. That helping "others"--even when you and yours aren't directly benefiting--is the right call because we live in a complex, interconnected society.
Humanity just needs to be decent enough that society functions relatively smoothly and we can collectively get shit done. It's never going to be perfect.
And it's certainly never going to be perfect if we'd all just follow this one strain of this one specific monotheistic religion that hasn't died out like thousands of religions before it because it was created after humans had invented writing and managed to get itself baked into the government of one of the largest and long-standing civilizations of the time.
Reading Christians talk about the Torah is more than a little infuriating.
Yes, I recognize that Judaism would have different views than a Christian perspective. Even though we accept a lot of same scriptures as part of our traditions, we have different approaches on how we interpret them.
Let us premise that an all knowing all powerful god specifically created the first two humans (we'll politely ignore the whole Lilith thing for this discussion) who, necessarily by design, did not know right from wrong and were specifically constructed such that they would, exactly as expected, disobey his orders not to eat an apple so that he could damn them and all of humanity for all time, just so he can pretend to be a super great being when he sacrifices himself to himself to forgive people of that act, but only if they happen to believe in and worship him, and apologize subserviently.
That's not exactly an ideal role model for ethics there. We can do better, and largely we have, at least when we don't let theocracy take hold and push those ancient nomadic desert goat herder ideals on us. We live in a world with more of us than any of the old religions could ever have imagined possible, with technology that would itself be god to them, let's stop looking to them for guidance on moral conundrums they couldn't even have fathomed much less been wise about.
But I'm not looking for others to be entirely unselfish and morally perfect in everyway. That's very unrealistic expectation.
What we need is herd immunity levels of unselfishness. Enough people have to realize that they need to cooperate with others most of the time. That helping "others"--even when you and yours aren't directly benefiting--is the right call because we live in a complex, interconnected society.
Humanity just needs to be decent enough that society functions relatively smoothly and we can collectively get shit done. It's never going to be perfect.
My point there (in my usual roundabout way) is coming from my argument that humans are not inherently good. We have to work at it, at best and that basic human nature really hasn't changed over the years.
However, if all we're striving for are "good enough" social and political systems, then I do agree that we can do better, and herd immunity levels of unselfishness would be a good, general goal that we all could work towards, regardless of religion or non-religion.
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