faetal on 18/2/2015 at 08:00

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That's over-cooking my stance. I'm not saying "how dare" anything, I'm saying how do we measure the magnitude of someone's goodness with or without religion? Let me put it this way:

If someone says that they don't agree with homosexuality because the bible says it is a sin - do we ascribe this to the person or to the religion? If the former, what allows for the cherry-picking of which parts of the scripture to ignore and which parts to adhere to? Bearing in mind that the scripture is pegged as being the infallible word of the creator of the universe - how do we parse this with moderate religious behaviour? Do moderates sort of know better than god?

Contrasting to this - if someone says that they are helping the homeless or even just keeping an eye on their neighbour because it is e.g. the Christian thing to do, then again, where does this behaviour originate from? The person, or the religion? If the former, then has religion actually made them a better person? If the latter, is that person actually a good person if they are only doing good things to appease a creator or score themselves a place in the afterlife?

These are genuine questions which occur to me, I'm not just bashing religion for its sake and would appreciate if people could refrain from lazy comparisons to Dawkins or embellishment of what I've actually said e.g. "how dare anyone..." in order to frame me as Militant Atheist Dude.

DDL on 18/2/2015 at 16:51

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Some correlation/causation issues there, possibly.

it's also worth noting that being stoned to death for

-Touching mount sinai
-Blaspheming
-Sex outside marriage (if female)
-Disobeying parents

Coincided with the mainstream belief that rights are issued and controlled by a series of angry men with beards on behalf of a divine creator.


We've come a long way since then, thankfully. And not because the book changed, but because we did.

Like it or not, rights ARE a mutable concept, and always have been.

heywood on 18/2/2015 at 23:31

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First, Christian scholars and denominations are all over the map regarding whether or not the Bible is infallible, inerrant, both, or neither, and also what infallible and inerrant mean. A common middle view is that infallibility means the Bible is trustworthy and complete on matters of faith and Christian practice, but may be in error regarding things like historical details which are irrelevant to faith and Christian practice. It's also a common view that the words of the Bible need study and interpretation to understand the original meaning and purpose. If you really want to understand what you call cherry picking, read up on the field of Biblical hermeneutics and the different principles and techniques used by different Christian churches to interpret scripture.

Second, the history, authorship, authenticity, interpretation, and applicability of scripture is continually being analyzed and debated by religious scholars who don't all agree, which is why there are three main branches of monotheism sharing a common origin (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) and a variety of subdivisions within each of those main branches. It also the main reason why religious beliefs aren't static.

Third, one fundamental thing you have to understand about Christian theology is supersessionism. Christians believe that the New Testament supersedes the old, but disagree amongst themselves about the degree and extent of supersessionism.

One area of disagreement is over the New Covenant (New Testament laws) vs. the Old Covenant (Old Testament laws). The Old Covenant is the set of Mosaic laws (laws of Moses) contained in the first 5(?) books of the Old Testament. The New Testament literally says that Christians are not held to the Mosaic laws, but some of the more conservative denominations believe that some of the Mosaic laws are still applicable. A common evangelical view is that the Mosaic law can generally be subdivided into three parts: moral code which is rooted in natural law and/or God's character and thus applies to everyone and is unchanging, ceremonial code which was superseded by the teachings of Jesus, and old Jewish civil law which didn't really have anything to do with religion and only applied to Israel and therefore expired with the old Jewish state. But some other Christians believe that all of it is supersesed by the New Covenant, even the Ten Commandments.

Another area of disagreement is over Old Testament mythology. Some Christians use supersessionism as part of the rationale for rejecting the creation myths. Whereas other Christians believe that only the Old Testament laws were superseded. But even the Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals who call themselves literalists and believe that God was guiding the people who wrote and compiled and translated the Bible don't believe in the literal truth of all the mythology. For instance, nobody believes that the Earth is flat and has 4 corners and stands on pillars. Nobody believes that Leviathan is a great serpent monster.

The Dawkins strawman says that you have to believe and follow every literal word in the Bible otherwise you're a hypocrite and can't call yourself a Christian. But the Dawkins strawman is not Christianity.



One person's motivation for charity might be scoring points with God, another person's motivation might be guilt, another's might be to impress somebody, another's might be compassion. A Christian could be motivated by any of the above or other things. I don't think it matters that much what internal motivation is driving you to be a good person as long as you are a good person.

Also, just because someone may have been taught morality in a religious setting doesn't necessarily mean they are motivated by the afterlife. I think it depends on how you were taught. I know a lot of older Catholics in my wife's family were raised under constant threats of fire and brimstone, but where I went to church heaven and hell wasn't a big part of my religious education. We were taught that we should look to Jesus as our model for Christian behavior and aspire to follow his example. For me, church was the venue and Christianity was the curriculum for most of my childhood education on morality, but I can't say that Christian beliefs were the basis for my moral beliefs, because I shed my Christian beliefs but still have much the same moral beliefs.

Tony_Tarantula on 19/2/2015 at 03:58

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If you were familiar with the document you would know the answer to that question.

faetal on 19/2/2015 at 09:29

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What does the average Christian know about bible scholar studies though? I'd say it's fairly realistic to say that the average Christian simply assimilates the parts of Christianity they agree with, while ignoring those which they don't. I'd need a lot of convincing to believe that the majority of Christians are keeping up to date with the provenance of scripture and the finer philosophical points of each piece of verse and its proper context.

I'd say the larger point however is that the Bible, to a non-believer, is simply (http://intentblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/20111220144241_1323535423003.jpg) a collection of ancient folk stories which have been arranged into a compendium, complete with translation errors, copy errors, parsing errors and political manipulations of inclusions, omissions and alterations over the centuries. ALL interpretation of what it means and which bits are historical, infallible etc.. are HUMAN interpretations of a collection of folk stories which pertain to a supposed creation of the universe and a quasi-historical account of some subsequent events intertwined with supernatural speculation. Also, everything supernatural conveniently happens way before humans develop any kind of technology to reliably record such events with any kind of neutrality.

But anyway, my briefer point is that if you look at the Bible as a collection of folk stories told by people and eventually turned into a book, then the wider implications of its provenance are simply interesting or not. If however, you deem the bible to be in any way derived from an actual entity which created the universe, then surely interpretation of it to suit contemporary ideas of morality is cherry-picking by default, even if you dress it up with more complexity by saying that it's only bible scholars doing so.

The point about why people do good things misses a very important point - we're moral by default. Altruistic behaviour is inherent to higher social animals, simply because it defines the most evolutionarily stable phenotype. If the brain evolves to activate reward pathways in response to good behaviour, then that organism will tend towards good behaviour. Religion teaching morality is much the same as an electrician teaching cheese-making - sure you can do it, but it's not really your area. Of course not everyone is altruistic, but that's because you always get a proportion of cheats within any stable system of morality - the key is that the system is only stable if the proportion stays below a certain level, otherwise there is no way for the cheats to survive. It's basic game theory and the model fits very closely with decades of observation of evolutionary psychology. This is why I find it a little disturbing when anyone mentions a "motivation" for being good, when really it's a similar motivation for sleeping, eating etc - we're just wired for it. Someone who only does good in anticipation of a reward might be a psychopath.

[EDIT] Just as an afterthought - I'm pretty sure a bible scholar could trawl through any old folk stories and mythologies and determine which bits they can and can't angle just right to superimpose onto written and archaeological history. This doesn't address any broader point of whether the supernatural parts are actual events or just the figment of humanity's collective imagination. It seems arbitrary that modern humanity accepts the notion of e.g. Greek, Egyptian & Roman polytheism as being primitive and unenlightened, but the notion of monotheism is somehow OK and plausible because....lots of people believe it. Most people quite rightly ridicule Scientology, but only I suspect because its provenance is recent enough to cast a spotlight on. I'm tending towards thinking that a large part of why religion is taken seriously by so many (in combination with being raised into a religion, which gives a heavy predisposition) is that its exact origins are shrouded in mystery and thus a suspension of disbelief can be maintained enough to believe that it speaks of the origins of the universe.

As another after-thought - one question I'd like to add for the moderates is why no mention of or even allusion to evolution in the bible? If an all-knowing creator was imparting wisdom to its creation, you'd think they might have mentioned that all species originated from shared ancestry. A big part of my scepticism is occupied with the fact that the wisdom this supposed creator decided to pass on to humans was suspiciously limited to the technical level of humanity at the time. This doesn't prove anything per se, but an all-knowing god passing on wisdom which people at the time *couldn't* have known, would be a smoking gun of evidence for there being a creator.