Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.
Oh,* that’s *what Dawkins is? I can think of cuter names for him.
Does he still live under his large wet rock? 
Well, yes, obviously. I mean, why would anyone expect that people 3000 years ago, living in another part of the world, with a different climate, society, economy, and form of government would have the same moral values as we do in our society? Just because there’s some historical continuity between their religion and ours? That’s why I’ve never understood why some people get so outraged by the stuff in the bible. They don’t get outraged by the Illiad, and that’s got plenty of raping, murdering, and gods doing stuff that seems pretty bad to us. Of course the actions are going to seem horrible to people who don’t share those values.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
You must be.
Who the hell holds the Illiad up as something to follow religiously? Who makes the claim that the Illiad is a perfect book and historically accurate?
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Bronze Age shepherds & seers to have had morals we would agree with.
I do think it’s reasonable to look at their Holy Books, examine their moral teachings, and say, “You know, that stuff is as full of crap as their ideas on astronomy and geography.”
Meh. Just as in the history of science, morality did not emerge fully developed in the modern era, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.
I would not laugh at Aristotle because his astronomy and geography were not up to 21st century standards, and I would not laugh at the redactors of the OT because their morality does not match modern 21st century liberal concerns. In each case, there is an obvious development going on - and the bits of the OT moderns find objectionable were probably already ancient when they were redacted; other parts of the OT, perhaps developed somewhat later, demonstrate a more refined sensibility.
If the target of your ire is biblical literalists, I’d agree with you guys - but they are hardly a majority of Jews, the religion most closely connected with the OT’s teachings. Most properly look to the Talmud, not the OT alone, for a description of morality - it deplays considerable advance over the more objectionable bits of the OT - quite a bit closer to the modern liberal end of the spectrum. Biblical literalism as we know and love it today seems most common among Christians, who really ought to be religiously commanded otherwise.
Way to downplay the difference. “Modern day 21st century liberal concerns”? How does it compare to modern day 21st century conservative concerns?
How about the concerns of either side in the 20th century?
19th century?
18th?
15th?
How far back did we start thinking that destroying entire countries and making slaves of its women isn’t something that should be boasted about?
And how many Christians and Jews today, even ones who claim that the Bible is a perfect book and a 100% historically accurate record of what God wants of us, go around stoning their kids, enslaving their neighbors, and grabbing each other’s testicles when they make an agreement?
Holy books are, by their nature, stagnant. The bible, the Qur’an, the Analects, the Buddhist Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, and all of the rest, were written when they were written a long time ago, reflecting the moral and cultural codes of the societies that wrote them. But as societies changed, as cultures and morals changed, these religions had a problem. They couldn’t throw out the books, because the books were given divine or semi-divine status, so what they did, and continue to do, is reinterpret the holy books to fit their own cultural and moral codes.
Lets look at slavery, for instance. Medieval Western European Christian preachers didn’t really have much to say on the subject of slavery. You’ll find sermons about all sorts of things, but not many about slavery. Even Thomas Aquinas, who says that slavery is a good thing, doesn’t really quote the bible much about it, relying more on Aristotle and his theories of natural slaves. And, of course, actual slavery was really rare in Western Europe in the Middle Ages.
Then, the New World is discovered, and the European powers who are taking over the Americas need cheap labor and start the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Then, like a miracle, you start seeing sermons, and argument, and treatises all about how slavery is divinely mandated in the Bible and is a positive moral good.
Then the abolitionists come along, and as part of their argument as to why slavery should be abolished, they rely on the bible, and how the bible says you should set slaves free, and how people should only have God as their master and not men, and how we’re all brothers and sisters descended from Adam and Eve.
The Medieval churchmen, the slaveholders, and the abolitionists were all reading the same bible, they all claimed it was divine and that they were following the divine will as expressed in it, but for the middle ages, the bible was neutral on slavery, for the slaveholders, the bible was for slavery, and for the abolitionists, it was antislavery. One work, but three completely incompatible definitions of what it says, based on what the people who read it needed it to say.
So, no, this isn’t me being deliberately obtuse. This is me pointing out that the bible is pretty inevitably, because of who wrote it and when it was written, going to have alien views, and that nobody today reads the bible the same way as the writers of the bible read it, whether they claim to do or not, and so the problem isn’t what the bible says, the problem is when people interpret it in a way you don’t like, and if you want to argue with them, you have to do what they do, and instead of saying the bible is horrible, argue why the bible doesn’t mean what they say it means.
I can’t find a single religion that admits that their particular holy book is stagnant. Btw, I have no need to “interpret” the Bible my way to argue that as a book of guidance it is extremely corrupt-I only have to read it verbatim.
That’s my point, though. They’re not going to admit that their particular holy book is stagnant. They have to, as an article of faith, accept that it isn’t. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to read it and try to follow it verbatim, because actually doing what it says verbatim would go against their beliefs. So they try to split the difference, by claiming the book is divinely inspired and then interpreting the text in some way that doesn’t offend their beliefs too much.
The problem is that you’re assuming that what the bible says is what Christians and Jews believe, when it’s not.
Good Lord.
I don’t doubt that you’ve taken a survey of your entire family to come to this conclusion, but you may want to read a headline or two.
I don’t know what the percentage of the population they are, or how much of the Hebrew Bible they choose to take literally, but I do know that there are enough Christians and Jews in the US, who take enough of the Hebrew Bible literally, to have a significant impact on abortion rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, our support of Israel and its policies, etc.
And I see no comparable political ideologies motivated by principles from the Iliad. When I do, I will spend more time denouncing them.
Huh? In the mid 20th century, eliminating whole classes of people through genocide was considered laudable by the governments of the numerical majority of humanity (Nazi Europe, Soviet Russia and Communist China) … and communism, for one, was hailed by many progressive intellectuals as enlightened.
Clearly, many people in the 20th century held up slavery and destroying entire countries, races and/or classes of people as something to boast about.
No, they don’t, because all the bible itself says about abortion rights is that you have to pay a fine if you cause a miscarriage, all it says about reproductive rights is that a guy has to sleep with his sister in law to give his brother an heir if his brother dies before managing to, all it says about gay rights is that you shouldn’t have gay sex, and it talks about the coming of a theocratic monarchy in Israel that’s nothing like modern Israel.
There are, however, a bunch of Christians and Jews in the US who interpret passages in the bible to reflect their political and social views, just like how back in slavery times, there were both abolitionists and slaveholders who interpreted passages in the bible to reflect their political and social views.
Conceding that you are right and everyone else is wrong in their interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, the point is that they still consider it to be relevant and authoritative today. So expecting non-believers to oppose the Bible no more than they do the Iliad is pretty ridiculous.
Conceding that you are right and everyone else is wrong in their interpretation of the Hebrew Bible (I especially like “you shouldn’t have gay sex” as the true meaning of “they shall surely be put to death”), the point is that they still consider it to be relevant and authoritative today. So expecting non-believers to oppose the Bible no more than they do the Iliad is pretty ridiculous.
Now how did an edit turn into a separate reply?
I’m pretty sure Voyager was making a joke, but he’s quite right.
They did “run like hell”. By my biblical atlas, Rameses to Succoth is about thirty miles (in a straight line). Exodos 12-41 has the entire host- three million Hebrews, old men and women, five-year-olds, pregnant women, cripples, sick, along with several million sheep, goats, cows, and donkeys- “all the hosts of the Lord”, out of Egypt the same day, which meant that they all raced across the desert, without food or water, at the speed of a good midpack ultramarathoner.
The locusts of Exodus? The bees of Samson? Or the lord of the flies?
I was going to stay out of this, since I really don’t have time for this discussion. There are a couple of points here that I simply couldn’t let slide, though.
Causing a miscarriage, as you surely know, is not the same as deliberately causing an abortion. Additionally, it seems that you’re making a reference to Exodus 21:22, which I think you’ve misinterpreted grievously.
If the Bible declares that the killing of innocents is ordinarily wrong, and if the unborn are considered living human beings (either by Biblical declaration, Biblical implication, or philosophical arguments), then it implicitly means that abortion is prohibited by the Bible. The Bible need not mention abortion specifically for it to be included in the general prohibition against taking the lives of innocents under ordinary circumstances. Even if one were to concede that the Biblical statements this this effect are not 100% clear cut (a conclusion that I disagree with0, that would still mean that it’s inaccurate to state that the Bible’s only declaration regarding “reproductive rights” pertains to the singular situation that you described.