I’m no more of a biblical than I am a Hebrew scholar. But the bible is a collection of stories, songs, poems, writings written over a long period of time by lots of different folks.
I’d say there’s no more a single “point” to the old testament than there is to the writings of Western philosophers taken as a whole. Perhaps less.
But it seems clear to me that the teaching of Jesus as set out in the gospels is that loving one’s neighbor is the underlying principle by which to interpret Torah (the Law) and the Prophets. If one interprets the Law to mean something other than treating others with compassion and respect, then one’s interpretation is wrong.
Are you actually interested in discussing this or are you just interested in attacking a strawman? Based on this quote…
…you’re making a True Scotsman argument. I don’t believe it says that at all. Are you interested in discussing what people who do believe in God, but aren’t Biblical literalists actually believe, or do you just want to keep asserting that your interpretation is the only valid one.
For a simple, though imperfect, analogy, look at the constitution. It was written by people over 200 years ago. Sure, some people treat the founding fathers very much like religious figures, but that’s really beside the point. We can sit here and look at the basic ideas put forth and evaluate how we can extract the best parts and interpret them to fit with modern life, or we can just focus on the fact that it supported slavery when it was written and throw the whole thing out.
What makes it an imperfect analogy is that there are amendments, but so many of the major principles that we apply every day were there explicitly when it was ratified, like freedom of speech and freedom of religion, or were interpretted implicitly from parts that were, like right to privacy.
So, why go focus on how the Old Testament talks about stoning people for this or that, realizing that, like with slavery in the US, the overwhelming majority of modern people do NOT support those views, when we should focus on the parts that DO apply to modern people.
I would agree that there isn’t necessarily a “best” ethic. Rather, my point is that ethics are rules that are more or less intended to bring about or further a particular view point or “best” outcome. Sure, what God wants is, by definition best, but we don’t really know that in any meaningful way, only our interpretations or the rules he teaches us to help us find that.
An analogy that I’d like to use would be to consider the game of chess. Currently, we have the problem “solved” in the sense that modern chess expert systems can consistently defeat human grand masters. However, we don’t have it absolutely solved in the same sense that we do with Tic-Tac-Toe where for any given state we know the absolute best move to guarantee at least a tie. Theoretically, though, with sufficient processing power and time, we could compute the entire state space for chess just like with Tic-Tac-Toe, and then know the perfect move from any given state, but that is well beyond our capability right now, so instead these expert systems rely on look-ahead, pruning, evaluating the advantage of various states, etc.
So, carrying this analogy over to morality, we can relate a given state and the choice of a move to facing a particuarly choice and all the alternatives. God, being omniscient and omnipotent would be like that theoretical machine that can calculate every possible alternative and knows the best choice to any given dilemma, but that level of calculation is beyond us as humans. Instead, its more like he’s training us. As an absolute novice, at the beginning of civilization, we have to focus just on learning how all the pieces move and the most basic of strategies. As we get more an more experience, we learn more specialized stategies, learning how to fork, build defenses, think a few moves ahead and consider how our opponent will move, etc. At some point, with enough practice and study I could even become a grandmaster able to look many moves ahead with hundreds of memorized opennings, strategies, etc.
So when we compare morals and ethics across cultures, or even across individuals, it’s like comparing hundreds of different chess players. Maybe I prefer one set of strategies over someone else, maybe one person has a higher general score over someone else, but ultimately, without that theoretical complete knowledge, all we’re really doing is finding more precise and effective ways of estimating what the best answer is, and even the “best” morality will sometimes come up short of that. And it is these strategies that are analagous to concepts like preserving life, honesty, honor, justice, or whatever other virtues various societies and individuals use to base their moral judgments on.
I don’t believe religion inherently dictates a specific command in any meaningful way. My parents once instructed me never to cross the street without holding an adults hand, yet I can’t recall the last time I did so, but it probably been at least 20-some years. At the time, I needed that direct command, but ultimately I needed to learn from it that I needed to be conscious of danger and take appropriate action to protect myself. Now I don’t need to do that.
I view the laws that the Bible taught in much the same way; in fact, I believe Jesus outlined exactly this sort of point when he talked about the greatest commandment. I think more primitive society needed a lot of direction and got a lot of rigid rules and what we really need to do is understand the intention behind them, and then we could extrapolate to realize how we should apply them to new situations. Yet, still, even many adults will fall back on “mom/dad always said…” or some principle with which they were raised with faced with difficult decisions.
It’s all part of the growing up we have to do as individuals, and as a society as a whole.
What is the “best” outcome? Some religious people might consider this getting into heaven and eternal bliss, even if that involves blowing up heathen. Even in secular terms, is the best outcome minimizing gun deaths or maximizing freedom?
Sorry, not even close, since as I said chess has an unambiguous goal but morality does not. Chess is infinitely easier also. Moves in chess mean but one thing, but consider the difference between the son of a rich man stealing a loaf of bread from a poor shopkeeper and the son of a poor and starving man stealing a loaf of bread from a rich shopkeeper.
Machine learning often involves a training phase. But, if God is training us, where is the feedback?
As you implied, chess does have a scoring system, and specific criteria about what a grandmaster is. When two players meet there are only three possible outcomes, and there is no uncertainty about which result was obtained. In most cases if you compare two moral outcomes you will get significant disagreement about which is better. God is supposedly the ultimate judge, but he ain’t talking. How is training supposed to work if we don’t know if we accomplished the task successfully or not?
The Judea in which the Torah was written was not a lot more primitive than the Judea of Jesus. What changed to make the kosher laws no longer necessary - except the need to recruit people who loved their shellfish, of course. High level rules are all very fine, but I challenge anyone to come up with universally agreed on moral decisions based only on them. No one has for 2,000 years or so.
In fact I’d content that primitive societies need less direction than we do. They don’t have to worry about on-line bullying, do they? Riding asses while intoxicated? Truth in advertising?
I’d bet parents with hand-holding rules relaxed them long before the kid was in college. I’d also bet that most would think that a parent whose only ethical training of a kid was to tell him or her to be good and love your neighbors as yourself wouldn’t be considered a very good parent.
We have lots of moral dilemmas. What we get from God is silence. What we get from his supposed representatives on earth is contradictory blather. There is either no god, or one who doesn’t give a crap.
I’m guessing you might be referring to, say, stoning those who have committed adultery.
And no, that punishment is not about treating others with compassion and respect. Thus, when folks brought the woman taken in adultery to Him, Christ told them that he who is without sin should cast the first stone, and forgave her.
In doing this, Christ was demonstrating “fulfillment” of the law, i.e. that loving one’s neighbor (including sinning neighbors) is not only the greatest but the paramount law.
As an aside (and as I’ve said, I am not a fundamentalist or a bible literalist, and have no expertise in matters biblical), it’s my understanding that capital punishment under Jewish law was fairly rare, with many hurdles to overcome before it could actually be inflicted, and that stoning for adultery was not favored by Jewish authorities for quite a while prior to the birth of Christ.
If you mean me, I didn’t say that or anything resembling it.
It’s called the New Testament for a reason.
To return to the rough analogy of the US Constitution and its amendments versus statutory law, if a state law says that a black person can’t vote or own property, it must be interpreted as invalid because it is inconsistent with the protections afforded by the Constitution. In the same way, if one’s neighbor commits adultery, the law that says she must be stoned to death is invalid under the greater law that says you must love her as you love yourself.
Has anyone ever put out a revised edition of the Old Testament that deletes(or at least underlines) all the parts that the New Testament makes invalid?
No. I was more thinking of forcing the victim of rape to marry her rapist. I’m thinking of the various laws about ritual cleanliness. Ever read those admittedly boring parts? The Orthodox still live by those rules, though I agree no one gets stoned.
Now, why would God inspire rules so easily misinterpreted? And if Jesus ever said they were not inspired by God, please give me a reference. God-given moral rules should not have to change and mature. Human-generated ones do, given our increasing moral sophistication. If Jesus ever said all that stuff, perhaps he was just one more step in the human moral development process? Especially since Judea was owned then by a civilization which didn’t have any problems with wearing mixed fabrics.
God seems to say exactly what you’d expect from the culture he said it to - just as if the ultimate lawgiver worked by reading the results of opinion polls.
BTW, the Golden Rule was expressed by Hillel before the birth of Jesus, so it wasn’t even original.
The Founders were not inerrant - though I suppose if you watch enough Fox News you might get the impression that they were. Plus, given that slavery was specifically allowed in the original Constitution, those state laws were perfectly constitutional until the proper amendments were enacted.
Most documents require revisions - just not ones supposedly inspired by deities.
BTW, how does the requirement of salvation through Jesus jibe with this greater law?
Yes, the Golden Rule existed before Christ. It was Christ who said it was one of the two greatest laws and the key to deciding how to live and understanding Torah.
I’m not aware of any passage in the New Testament where Jesus says that Mosaic Law or even Levitican law is not inspired by God. But it does seem to me that the many examples of Christ preaching/showing that love for one’s fellows is the most important principle amount to a fairly explicit preemption clause as it were.
What is it about the culture of the 1st century AD (or the third through 9th I guess) in Judea that makes loving your neighbor such a crowd-pleaser?
Not the authors of the Bible - God. How do we know which rules the authors made up and which come from God?
As for salvation, my understanding is that salvation comes through Jesus only. (Though some churches are getting wishy-washy about it - it has certainly been the understanding for hundreds of years.) Whether ignoring Jesus separates you from God’s love, or if it sends you to a nasty place, it does not seem in keeping with your rule.
I’m Jewish, so the whole thing is meshuggah as far as I’m concerned.
Being oppressed helps. Having your neighbor treat you like he would himself is more appealing if your neighbor is richer than you. But, do you have evidence that this was the appeal? Wouldn’t not being condemned to the just invented hellfire have something to do with it? Not to mention that nations went with their monarchs - it is not like there was a vote.
Your interpretation matches others’ interpretations, so I have no dispute with it.
But there is nothing in either book that says that the New Testament trumps the Old. Or that a New Testament will be along to modify the Old. Or that a modification is even possible, unlike the US Constitution, which explicitly outlines how it could be modified.
About the only thing we know is that all biblical books were written by men. That is rarely in contention, although how much divine help was involved, if any, is. That said, all modern interpretations begin from a shaky foundation. Jews don’t believe that there was any modification; Christians do, but don’t all agree on how much, what and where. There’s a lot of dogma, but not a lot of truth.
Interesting, I rather thought you were referring to a line of thought (in which I am not well-versed) that the gentle Jesus generally portrayed in the gospels was the result of politics, i.e. the conquest and loss of Jerusalem in the latter half of the first century and the need of the Christian communities for whom they were written to forbear and forgive as they were without political power or even the central authority of the church of Jerusalem.
It’s hard to know what people then thought of the references to fire and/or eternal punishment; there are so many ways to read those passages in the gospels and as you know Christians today still have widely varying views. But the principle of loving one’s neighbor seems unequivocal (if extremely hard to implement).
It is a bit meshugga. I think the Episcopalian (liberal, hence wishy-washy) view is similar to the RC’s, i.e. humankind was saved when Christ died on the cross. Individual salvation is an ongoing process that doesn’t necessarily end after physical death.