Morality 2 - Not - So - Good books

Imagine your society has a new leader who publicizes four laws they intend to phase in, as follows: Law 1: Any citizen who talks on a Friday will be executed. The leader was born on a Friday and didn't talk and wants this respected in law. Law 2: Your leader can kill citizens or order their killing for any reason. Law 3: Any citizen forced by your leader to commit crimes through mind-altering drugs, will be punished. Law 4: Parents who commit crime will have their children killed and if it's not their first offence they'll be made to eat their children. These laws would no doubt spark outrage. Law 1 kills people for victimless crime. Law 2 makes the lawmaker unaccountable by declaring their own killings 'lawful' by definition. Laws 3 and 4 explicitly punish the blameless directly contradicting the principle of personal responsibility with law 4 adding an obscene element designed to dehumanize. They are definitive cases of injustice. So if asked about our objections to these laws we're not confined to saying they're not to our taste. We have non-arbitrary reasons to object. These laws would lead to clearly identifiable abuses. We know too much about what constitutes harmful behaviour, suffering and responsibility to allow such laws to be incorporated into our justice systems. But what if this leader's been in office all your life and you've been brought up to think they're morally perfect? Such a lawmaker wouldn't make laws that were unjust so this would create major cognitive dissonance. How would we respond? Perhaps we'd invent some context in which of course it's right for someone who'd done so much for the society to make some essentially arbitrary demands. Or perhaps we'd try to evade the problem by saying their grasp of morality was so far ahead of ours we couldn't understand them that they 'worked in mysterious ways'. But we'd be wrong. Clearly, the root of the problem is the false and morally corrupting idea that the lawmaker is perfect. It's corrupting because, in causing us to accept unjust laws it leaves us defending the indefensible. Remove this idea and we can see the unjust laws for what they are. When we accept ideas uncritically or make them sacred, so we don't question them this can distort our moral reasoning because we're then prone to having mistaken ideas ruling our attitudes and behaviour outside our awareness. Those who've swallowed whole (or 'intro- jected') the idea, "The lawmaker is perfect" cannot properly evaluate the law until this distorting idea is identified and removed. Identifying ideas we've 'swallowed whole' is sometimes the key to resolving problems in many areas of life. When we consider the traits attributed to the biblical deity, Yahweh clearly if it existed, it couldn't be better placed to mete out fair, consistent justice. We're told it knows our thoughts knows who's guilty or innocent, and is perfectly moral. So, unlike human justice administrators it would have no excuse for punishing anyone but the guilty or for punishing them disproportionately. And yet, according to the Bible it permits, commits and commands the vilest atrocities corresponding directly to the laws we've just rejected. It orders the killing of those who work on the sabbath, gay people and women who show insufficient evidence of virginity on their wedding night. It kills 70,000 people when David takes a census, at Yahweh's request and kills almost all land animals by flooding for human wickedness. It hardens the hearts of the Pharaoh, the Egyptians and the King of Heshbon through mind control, to enable their defeat and destruction; it sends a 'powerful delusion' to make certain people 'believe a lie' in order to condemn them; and it deceives prophets into giving false messages then punishes them for doing so. Having stated no child will be killed for its father it orders the killing of children for their father's sins; the killing of Amalekite infants; the killing of children without pity. And at least three books in the bible see Yahweh sink to announcing one of the most depraved punishments we could imagine: making people eat their own families. Some claim that if the monotheistic god doesn't exist everything is permitted. In fact, if we accept the Bible, the reverse is true. The Bible tells us explicitly that Yahweh has not only permitted but endorsed ***, slavery the killing of babies, familial cannibalism and mass ***. It is Yahweh that permits everything. When our judgment isn't impaired by false teaching we can plainly see the injustices here as we did with the four laws. But what if we've been brought up to think Yahweh really exists and is morally perfect and this now rules our judgment? How do we respond to these acts? Declare them just? We know that killing those known not to be responsible for the sins being punished is quintessentially unjust. Do we concoct elaborate justifications? No. When we indulge any impulse to excuse or defend these acts we're already going dangerously astray. If we justify these acts, what won't we justify? Do we brush Yahweh's cruelties under the carpet of symbolism claiming they're not meant to be taken literally? Nothing in the Bible makes clear that Yahweh's infanticides are purely symbolic. But even if they were, the idea of an omnibenevolent baby-punisher makes no more sense as a symbol than as a literal being. Do we claim these passages are beyond our understanding? Not only is that unconvincing when we condemn humans who act this way without hesitation it represents one of the most deplorably irresponsible attitudes towards morality and justice we can encounter. We can't paper over these serious issues by declaring the existence of a supernatural being with unfathomable behaviour. Nor should we be duped into thinking this response shows humility. Admitting we don't understand everything about the universe is humble. Saying we don't understand that making people eat their children is a depraved punishment even if it's ordered by a god is an inexcusable abdication of critical judgment. But if one does argue there's a god that works in mysterious ways ways that utterly contradict our notions of moral behaviour then its nature is clearly not the source of our morality. If, according to the Bible Yahweh's nature deems familial cannibalism a just punishment yet we'd call any human who devised such a punishment depraved then these positions are in direct conflict and invoking divine mystery does nothing to resolve that conflict. Responding to these atrocities with examples of mercy doesn't work either. It just shows the Bible contains both mercy and atrocity. Some emphasize the New Testament above the Old shifting focus from Yahweh to the comparative gentleness of Jesus. But in Matthew 15, Jesus endorses Yahweh's order to kill those who curse their parents presumably including Tourette's sufferers whose cursing results from neurological disorder. Two of the gospels have the bizarre story of Jesus punishing a fig tree making it wither because it has no fruit when he's hungry even though it's not the season for it to bear fruit. This is like smashing a tv set on Friday because the Sunday film isn't showing. It's unstable behaviour, a tantrum. Some apologists say Jesus is reinforcing the parable of the barren fig tree a comment on fruitless people. But that doesn't hold water. The tree he curses isn't barren: his words show he is stopping it from bearing fruit again. Also, later verses reveal that the main point of this miracle is to show that with enough faith, one can literally move mountains. This is merely a display of destructive power against a healthy tree to show Jesus' dominance over nature and convince his disciples they shall receive whatever they desire if they pray with enough conviction - a questionable message in itself. Jesus tells a man wishing to follow him that he can't go back to inform his family. The man must instantly dispose of his closest relationships. No option even to fetch his family so they can all follow. These are Christian family values according to the Bible. The 'good news' of Jesus is not so good. Of course, as before what's at the root of all these familiar responses is a false belief. Once we realize the biblical god doesn't exist; once we overcome our reluctance to question an idea fed to us when we were least able to evaluate it - an idea we're trained, some of us even threatened, not to question - the dissonance disappears and we stop having to torture logic to disguise Yahweh's injustice. A perfectly just being would not order the killing of innocents. It wouldn't create problems or violate the principle of responsibility by using mind-control to induce punishable behaviour. It wouldn't regulate abusive practices such as slavery, but condemn them. Nor would it punish disproportionately... Declaring something perfect then using that declaration to infer that everything it does is perfect is not how valid reason works. When one argues for the existence of a god that's perfect in its justice, love and honesty these are highly specific and highly fragile claims... A being with these qualities can't do just anything. Many behaviours will, by definition, lie outside its possible repertoire. If it punishes the innocent or makes use of deception any claim to perfect virtue shatters into incoherence. Perfection is an absolute and when Yahweh uses deception regardless of the reasons apologists put forward for this behaviour the use of deception *in and of itself* destroys the claim that Yahweh is perfectly honest. Many who reject theism are told they owe their morality to religion that they borrow 'moral capital' from Judeo-Christian tradition. Even if this were true the Judeo-Christian tradition borrowed from what came before. It wasn't the monotheistic religions that invented prohibitions against ***, theft or perjury. These prohibitions promote peaceful coexistence and were doing so long before the Bible's writers were born so the claim that we borrow moral capital already rings hollow. But, more importantly if the Judeo-Christian tradition reflects the Bible an epic set of texts in which practices across the entire moral spectrum are endorsed and permitted from virtuous to vicious it's no more valid to say we borrow from this than to say we borrow from a hypothetical human whose extensive catalogue of good and bad deeds range from charity to mass ***. Something that spans the moral spectrum will, by definition, have some great virtue in it but this doesn't mean we use it as a moral guide. When the mass-murdering charity worker stands trial the charity doesn't make up for the murders and the murders destroy any claim that he's a role model. Likewise the many immoral teachings in the Bible provide the grounds on which we must condemn these passages outright as morally disgraceful and reject any suggestion that the Bible is a source of reliable revelation. We cannot trust the Bible as a moral guide. But it's even worse than that. The insanity of the Bible is that what it permits in one passage it prohibits in another. The making of images or likenesses of anything from Earth or Heaven is both forbidden and commanded. People are ordered to stone others to death yet only those without sin are fit to cast the first stone and we're told no one is without sin. Good deeds must be shown, and not shown. These conflicting requirements defy rationality. Of course, much of the Bible's appeal depends on its countless moral inconsistencies which enable almost anyone to find passages that endorse their particular view. Some find passages to support their bigotry; some to validate their thirst for blood. Others focus on passages endorsing peace and acceptance. But books that endorse all view- points, ultimately endorse none. Non-Christians who cite biblical cruelties are often accused of cherry-picking. In fact, non-Christians can freely acknowledge both kindness and cruelty in the Bible; but clearly it's the cruelties that should concern any decent person. It's those who ignore the immoral content of religious scripture who are truly cherry-picking. Theists who discard the less palatable parts of scripture should at least be honest about the standards by which they do this and concede that they are applying their own independent judgment to scripture. Obviously, when we use our own moral sense to separate good and bad in scripture - when we revise our interpretations of it to reflect the more enlightened view of our time - it isn't scripture guiding our morality but our morality guiding our perception of scripture. The Bible is an extra- ordinary set of texts. However what it gives us is not the word of a perfect being but a fascinating record of the inconsistent beliefs and customs of ancient people as described by a disparate assortment of fallible human authors writing centuries ago borrowing extensively from others' mythology and giving frequently conflicting versions of events never witnessed by the authors but circulated for decades by word of mouth. Many of these authors felt the mass extermination of lives was honourable behaviour for a god confusing morality with power and they poured this flawed understanding into their writings. But if their ancient minds failed to see the cruelty and contradiction in what they wrote it should not be invisible to us now and we do ourselves grave injustice if we enshrine their ignorance in our morality. They didn't know better. We do. Religious scripture is fixed in distant history and its many endorsements of cruelties we don't tolerate today make this abundantly evident. It is not a virtue of religious dogma that it doesn't change. It is the most profound failing. Moral systems that can't develop in response to advances in our understanding cannot edify. They ossify. Moral considerations far from leading us to embrace the so-called 'good books' are exactly what should lead us to reject them. The next video in this series looks closer at the nature of morality including discussion of objectivity, subjectivity and the is/ought problem.