We're smarter than God
posted by Liberal Eagle at 3:15 PM
I've complained repeatedly about the nonsensical idea that the Ten Commandments are 1) the foundation of modern law, and 2) the best basis for morality, even in the modern world.
I mean, the Ten Commandments are lame. The first three are God being insecure. There's a bunch of thought policing (look, God, if you're going to condemn people for wanting things, you should have thought about that before you created us selfish and horny) and some ridiculous religious rules that even the most religious people I know don't observe, like doing nothing but worship on Sunday.
Furthermore, of the few commandments that actually do resemble modern moral precepts (I count three), the highest, "you shall not kill," rapidly becomes less admirable when you consider it in scriptural context: it plainly means only "don't kill other Jews," as demonstrated by the fact that God, after saying that, orders his chosen people to commit merciless slaughter of neighboring tribes who weren't obviously doing anyone any harm (something God does a lot in the Old Testament).
As Sam Harris points out in his Letter To A Christian Nation, if these really were the fundamental, immortal rules the wisest and greatest being in the universe saw fit to hand down, verbatim, they would be the wisest and greatest words written in any language, ever. And they self-evidently aren't.
I would hate to meet someone who actually based is life on the Ten Commandments. But as Richard Dawkins points out in The God Delusion, modern religious people, even the ones who say they base their morality on the Ten Commandments, pretty obviously don't.
So what rules do we live by? What moral ideas guide atheist and believer alike? Because I would say even the very religious, in practice, act a hell of a lot more like their modern atheist neighbors than like the people in the Bible. Either testament.
Dawkins googles the phrase "new ten commandments" and comes up with a suggested list from an atheist web site. I googled the same phrase and came up with the same list, from a site called Ebon Musings:
1. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. (The Golden Rule of Jesus, yes, but presented earlier by the likes of Buddha and Confucius and Epicetus and Zoroaster--but usually stated in the negative, as it is here, which I personally prefer.)
2. In all things, strive to cause no harm.
3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted. (To be honest, I much prefer this both to Jesus's instruction to turn the other cheek, and everyone else in the Bible's jaw-dropping bloodlust.)
5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder. (For some reason it strikes me as funny to imagine these new commandments, like the old ones, backed up with the threat of capital punishment for breaking them: "Live life with a sense of joy and wonder. Or I'll kill you!")
6. Always seek to be learning something new.
7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them. (This one wins the award for most diametric opposition to Yahweh's whole "believe with no evidence, or I'll let Satan torture you for eternity" thing.)
8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
10. Question everything.
The first five guide moral behavior; the last five guide thought in a moral direction. They don't tell you what to think; they simply tell you to think.
Honestly--and I do mean that literally; please be honest with yourself--how is it possible not to look at a list like this one--or any of hundreds of similar ones around the internet and elsewhere--and not recognize far greater morality in them than in that bronze-age set of tribal religious rules so many people want to hang in American courtrooms?
The fact is, thousands of years of moral philosophy have led us to a consensus that would have been unrecognizable even decades ago, let alone milennia. Today, to believer and unbeliever alike, it is unthinkable in the civilized world to go slaughter a neighboring tribe simply because you want their land, to keep slaves, to treat women as property and batter them to death with rocks for adultery. But that's only scratching the surface of all the things that the authors of the Bible, and pretty much everyone else alive back then, thought were morally acceptable.
That fact alone is, to me, pretty inarguable proof that, in fact, the Bible is noy only not immortal, inerrant revealed truth, it's not, in fact and practice, even the foundation for the morals of believers, even if they think it is. If the second list seems more moral to you than the original commandments, you are not getting your morality from the Bible; you are getting it from some other source, which is not scriptural, and therefore it is just as possible for an atheist to be moral as it is a religious person.
I might even say it's more so, though I think religious and unreligious people are probably genuinely moral in roughly equal numbers. But, an atheist or agnostic does not have to painstakingly cherry-pick a very flawed ancient text for those few passages, in between all the weirdness and incest and rape and genocide and God asking people to slaughter their children, that conform to modern morals ("okay, let's ignore all the obscene glorification of pointless slaughter in Exodus; it does say not to kill, so let's focus on that!").
I had an e-mail exchange, recently, with a Christian who took me to task for not acknowledging that not all believers take the Bible literally. Well, in fact, I think I did acknowledge that in the post in question, but never mind that; my point is, the fact that modern, liberal Christians, the kind who, in my judgment, are actually behaving in a loving, tolerant, moral fashion, have to disregard huge sections of the Bible to do it, and focus on others. How do they select which passages count and which are "metaphors" of some convoluted variety?
Well, they exercise their own moral sense. They know going in what they believe is right and wrong, and they find the parts of the Bible that conform to that. That's precisely what I, an atheist, do, only without the Bible part. But atheists and liberal believers are drawing morality from some deeper, more complicated, very modern place, and it's the same place, and it is emphatically not scripture.
I mean, the Ten Commandments are lame. The first three are God being insecure. There's a bunch of thought policing (look, God, if you're going to condemn people for wanting things, you should have thought about that before you created us selfish and horny) and some ridiculous religious rules that even the most religious people I know don't observe, like doing nothing but worship on Sunday.
Furthermore, of the few commandments that actually do resemble modern moral precepts (I count three), the highest, "you shall not kill," rapidly becomes less admirable when you consider it in scriptural context: it plainly means only "don't kill other Jews," as demonstrated by the fact that God, after saying that, orders his chosen people to commit merciless slaughter of neighboring tribes who weren't obviously doing anyone any harm (something God does a lot in the Old Testament).
As Sam Harris points out in his Letter To A Christian Nation, if these really were the fundamental, immortal rules the wisest and greatest being in the universe saw fit to hand down, verbatim, they would be the wisest and greatest words written in any language, ever. And they self-evidently aren't.
I would hate to meet someone who actually based is life on the Ten Commandments. But as Richard Dawkins points out in The God Delusion, modern religious people, even the ones who say they base their morality on the Ten Commandments, pretty obviously don't.
So what rules do we live by? What moral ideas guide atheist and believer alike? Because I would say even the very religious, in practice, act a hell of a lot more like their modern atheist neighbors than like the people in the Bible. Either testament.
Dawkins googles the phrase "new ten commandments" and comes up with a suggested list from an atheist web site. I googled the same phrase and came up with the same list, from a site called Ebon Musings:
1. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. (The Golden Rule of Jesus, yes, but presented earlier by the likes of Buddha and Confucius and Epicetus and Zoroaster--but usually stated in the negative, as it is here, which I personally prefer.)
2. In all things, strive to cause no harm.
3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted. (To be honest, I much prefer this both to Jesus's instruction to turn the other cheek, and everyone else in the Bible's jaw-dropping bloodlust.)
5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder. (For some reason it strikes me as funny to imagine these new commandments, like the old ones, backed up with the threat of capital punishment for breaking them: "Live life with a sense of joy and wonder. Or I'll kill you!")
6. Always seek to be learning something new.
7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them. (This one wins the award for most diametric opposition to Yahweh's whole "believe with no evidence, or I'll let Satan torture you for eternity" thing.)
8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
10. Question everything.
The first five guide moral behavior; the last five guide thought in a moral direction. They don't tell you what to think; they simply tell you to think.
Honestly--and I do mean that literally; please be honest with yourself--how is it possible not to look at a list like this one--or any of hundreds of similar ones around the internet and elsewhere--and not recognize far greater morality in them than in that bronze-age set of tribal religious rules so many people want to hang in American courtrooms?
The fact is, thousands of years of moral philosophy have led us to a consensus that would have been unrecognizable even decades ago, let alone milennia. Today, to believer and unbeliever alike, it is unthinkable in the civilized world to go slaughter a neighboring tribe simply because you want their land, to keep slaves, to treat women as property and batter them to death with rocks for adultery. But that's only scratching the surface of all the things that the authors of the Bible, and pretty much everyone else alive back then, thought were morally acceptable.
That fact alone is, to me, pretty inarguable proof that, in fact, the Bible is noy only not immortal, inerrant revealed truth, it's not, in fact and practice, even the foundation for the morals of believers, even if they think it is. If the second list seems more moral to you than the original commandments, you are not getting your morality from the Bible; you are getting it from some other source, which is not scriptural, and therefore it is just as possible for an atheist to be moral as it is a religious person.
I might even say it's more so, though I think religious and unreligious people are probably genuinely moral in roughly equal numbers. But, an atheist or agnostic does not have to painstakingly cherry-pick a very flawed ancient text for those few passages, in between all the weirdness and incest and rape and genocide and God asking people to slaughter their children, that conform to modern morals ("okay, let's ignore all the obscene glorification of pointless slaughter in Exodus; it does say not to kill, so let's focus on that!").
I had an e-mail exchange, recently, with a Christian who took me to task for not acknowledging that not all believers take the Bible literally. Well, in fact, I think I did acknowledge that in the post in question, but never mind that; my point is, the fact that modern, liberal Christians, the kind who, in my judgment, are actually behaving in a loving, tolerant, moral fashion, have to disregard huge sections of the Bible to do it, and focus on others. How do they select which passages count and which are "metaphors" of some convoluted variety?
Well, they exercise their own moral sense. They know going in what they believe is right and wrong, and they find the parts of the Bible that conform to that. That's precisely what I, an atheist, do, only without the Bible part. But atheists and liberal believers are drawing morality from some deeper, more complicated, very modern place, and it's the same place, and it is emphatically not scripture.
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