I don’t want to get into that discussion here as well (if others do, they may), but I doubt that Dawkins would say that there are objective moral standards, though he may believe that some standards are more or less universal among humans.
And the problem with good religion (according to Dawkins) is that it is no less false than bad religion. By encouraging the acceptance of false ideas, good religion makes people and society more susceptible to bad religion.
I agree with this, we do not have an answer to this question. My belief is that morality is largely independent of religion, but Dawkins largely argues against scripture as a source of morality. Were I religious, I would not be arguing that morality comes from scripture, rather it is a gift that God gives each of us personally. Harder to argue against.
I’ll try to explain as best I can.
The analogy between the quantum scale and the spiritual realm only goes so far. With quantum, we dealt with things that were beyond human perception because our senses were not sufficient for anything that small. With the spiritual realm, all the major religions agree that the beings in the spiritual realm can and do move into and out of the human realm, or in other words there’s communication going on. But they would all (as far as I know) agree that the communication is not perceptible to the ordinary senses, or at least that it sometimes is not. What we’re talking about I’d call a “sixth sense”, except that the term has been abused so heavily as to become a laughing stock.
The important thing to realize for our discussion is that the sixth sense is not like the ordinary five senses. Those five all appear automatically in most people during infancy. The sense that puts us in touch with the spiritual realm does not; it has to be developed carefully. Some of the techniques for this include intense study, prayer, charity work, meditation, physical self-denial, and others.
Maybe Flatland is a halfway decent analogy?
I don’t believe you have understood what Dawkins is doing in the chapter on the Bible. He is doing something rather different and very sensible, tying in with his earlier roots of morality: he’s showing us that it is nonsense to claim that the Bible is teaching us morals. Why? Because besides the morally acceptable or desirable tenets of Jesus or Moses’s Ten Commandments, there are hundreds of stories which are violent, dark, unpleasant and generally unsuitable for any sort of instruction. We are not getting morals from scripture, because we require an independent mechanism to differentiate good morals from bad when we are forced to decide that it’s good morals to turn the other cheek and bad morals to smite the Philistines and murder their children. The Bible does NOT tell us which stories we are to take literal and which we are to take as allegories, or that the Mosaic 10 Commandments are still up-to-date morals and the killing of the unbelievers is not: humans picked these two apart independently of the Bible’s guidance, because the Bible does not offer such moral guidance.
It’s still a poor analogy. Quantum theory aspires to, and will succeed or fall by its ability to, make predictions about physical phenomena. It is, therefore, possibly beyond easy human perception in the sense of feeling, hearing, etc (not, however, in mathematical terms). The “spiritual realm”, however, is beyond proof. Quantum theory IS in the human realm – its proponents, if their experiments fail, won’t be able to say “you just don’t get it”. How would you go about proving the existence of the “spiritual realm”?
This is fine, but of course, if these things can be sensed in any way, and especially if communication is taking place, the these aren’t things beyond the realm of understanding. On the contrary, they are firmly within the purview of science. Are you sure that’s the route you want to take?
That’s kind of like saying we don’t get food from nature because we require an independent mechanism to differentiate the edible plants from the inedible plants and rocks and bear droppings.
It’s not a matter of differentiating good moral teaching from bad moral teaching, but of differentiating moral teaching from other stuff that is a whole nother genre than moral teaching, was never intended to be moral teaching, and wouldn’t have been understood as moral teaching by its original audience (or us, if we didn’t come to it with the preconceived notion that it should be).
That’s a good point IF it’s the case that the parts that clearly ARE moral teachings are good moral teachings.
But that’s a side issue to the main point I wanted to make, which is that your analogy stinks! 
Well, yeah, at least the bear droppings do… 
Huh? If you think that’s an accurate analogy, then I’m afraid there’s little more to be said. Are you claiming that “good” and “bad” in a moral sense are as easily distinguished as “edible” and “inedible”?
Huh, again? There are dozens if not more moral teachings, followed, for example, by Jews but not by Christians, that are just there, in the OT, that Christians ignore because they want to. There is absolutely no Bible-imanent reason to do so – which is Dawkins point. But let’s go through it point by point, if you please:
I don’t believe that’s an apt analogy.
As I understand it, the idea is that in order to differentiate between what are moral lessons, what’s just stories, and what are morals but not the morals you might immediately think, the “independent mechanism” itself includes a moral system. This moral system is then what we end up taking out of the Bible as well.
A better analogy would be to say that we don’t get food from nature because we hunt it down with baguette spears - and then end up eating the baguette.
Dozens? Because they want to? Not because of any exegetical reasons, but because they want to?
Cite, please?
Reminder: We’re not talking about whether you personally disagree with their exegetical interpretation or not. After all, your claim is that they specifically ignore these teachings out of a desire to do so. If you’re going to insist that this is their motive, I’d like to see you substantiate that claim.
I apologize for the cheap shot “because they want to”, and rephrase that: Christians can ignore dozens of moral teachings that Judaism draws from the Bible because someone, in applying his innate, philosophically acquired or socially shaped moral conceptions, picked out some commandments to follow and left out others, and thus drew different conclusions from a text that Thudlow Boink alleges is capable of giving us morals. It’s not – it’s capable of providing illustrative stories or a supernatural affirmation of those morals, but to draw anything out of the Bible, you have to have a set of values to start with.
In short, I deny the possibility of exegetically acquiring a specific set of morals from the Bible that does not include all commandments therein. If you grant that some religions and sects have successfully managed to adopt some “thou shalts” and “ye shalls” while ignoring others, I see no obvious way to avoid granting an extra-scriptural sense of morality and ethics, or values in general, that drove those choices.
In case you were also doubting that there were obvious commandments that Christians ignore (whether through exegesis or not I don’t know – I don’t even know how I’d go about finding out why the Catholic Church allows its members to eat pork):
Dietary laws, stemming from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, observed by Jews, not observed by Christians, even though the passage in Deut. says “These are the beasts which ye shall eat…”
A good site to pick out things that Jews take for commandments and then see which Christians still see as such: A List of the 613 Mitzvot (Commandments). Feel free to pick the dozens that I suggested.
But that’s a good example: In what way, shape, or form could the dietary laws constitute moral instruction?
That’s like saying “Wash your hand before you eat” or “Keep frozen until ready to use” is a moral rule.
If your (or Dawkins’s) point is that the Bible is not the definitive source for morality, that it neither describes nor prescribes everything we need to know about right and wrong, I agree with that point. But that’s different from whether or not the Bible teaches or influences morality, and I think Dawkins makes a major mistake about how it purports to do so (as do others among its professed fans and foes).
I’m afraid I don’t agree with your reasoning here at all. First of all, the mere fact that a human being can sense something does not mean that he or she can understand it. Secondly, it doesn’t mean that it’s within the purview of science. A person listening to a great symphony can sense the artistic brilliance and spiritual uplift of it, but those things are not within the scientific realm. Depending on who you ask, you might learn that these aspects of the symphony are not scientific because they are merely emotionl, or because they represent a higher level of existence. Both sides would probably agree, however, that you don’t go to the science department to learn about these aspects of the symphony.
If god exists he could easily reveal himself and settle once and for all that he is there. Why doesn’t he? The stakes are incredibly high. To be charbroiled forever and tortured in hell because you do not believe. is a horrible act. What kind of twisted god would that be? It would be terrible to punish people for not believing when he could make it so easy. If you believe in god ,you should think about what petty and cruel deity it would be.
Why not? Certainly science won’t help us in understanding the artistic merit of the symphony. But it can help us understand which areas in the brain correspond to that emotional state. What corresponds to a spiritual uplift, if indeed there is a connection. We could then try influencing those regions directly, to see if we can cause that same emotional state or spiritual uplift without the music. Sounds like science to me.
IOW, that which may be sensed may not be under the purview of science always; but the sensing is.
You could also study whether symphonies exist (if it were in doubt), what people find uplifting in a symphony and how and why these responses vary across people or cultures, how we detect and process sounds, what causes sounds and what they are, and what evolutionary, developmental and cultural processes led to brains that respond to sounds like music the way they do.