Picking and Choosing Your Moral Code

I saved the best for last. These two clips are the final in the list I had made to share with my religious friend, and they also happen to be my favorites.



This is episode #503 of the Atheist Experience. The topic is on responding to apologists. The portion of this episode that I want to focus on is in the last fifteen minutes or so, but feel free to watch the entire episode. Go to the 1:14:00 mark to listen to a great conversation between the hosts and a Christian caller.

The discussion here eventually turns to biblical inerrancy and morality. When the host points out some of the deplorable acts of god and his immoral laws in the old testament, the caller claims that those things no longer apply and that those laws were to "train up" the people of ancient times. The host knocks her argument out of the water by making three important points.

• In the bible, god says that he us unchanging and therefore if something was morally correct in the past, it should be morally correct today
  
• Jesus himself in the new testament says that not a single aspect of the old laws will be changed (Matthew 5:18)
  
• The caller believes that the ten commandments are binding today, yet those are written in the old testament

This is a great example of how many believers are guilty of picking and choosing from their religious text. They focus on only the positive parts of their doctrine that make them personally feel good. And they ignore (or choose to remain ignorant) of all of the horrific acts and commands. Here's a nice long list of cruelty and violence found in the Christian bible. It says to kill children, kill those who commit adultery, kill non believers (hey, that's me!), kill homosexuals, cut off the hand of a woman if she touches a man's genitalia, etc. Now why do you think Christians ignore all of those commandments? Probably because they don't want to follow them, because an average human being is much more moral than this psychopathic deity character that so many millions of people worship. It makes no sense to me. But I suppose I would rather have them pick and choose and only focus on the good stuff than try to live out what the bible says word for word. But I still find it really, really annoying when believers pick and choose parts of their doctrine that they like and ignore everything else.







This is another Christian caller and the discussion in these clips focuses on the morality of human beings and god. Moral superiority and inferiority, justification of adequate punishment for misdeeds, biblical portrayal of the nature of god, and thoughts on hell. I don't have much to add here because I think this video needs no commentary. I do share the host's frustration and disappointment with the caller. He seems like a very nice, very decent guy and he just doesn't have the balls to oppose his religious dogma. The last two thirds of the second clip are a passionate rant by the host on the caller's reluctance to be honest with his feelings.




Well, that's it! I finally finished posting all of these clips. I'm going to make another post later that has every single one of these clips embedded to make it easy to reference. I also have a lot of other videos I found related to these discussions that I'll share in another large post. But I'm not going to analyze and discuss each of them like I have done so here. Most of them are long documentaries, but they really taught me a lot and gave me some interesting perspectives on the matter. Thanks for sharing in all this material with me and I hope that you thought about the topics and gained something out of it!

Truth and Dogma

This clips talks about problems in the Christian bible, which including conflicting accounts, contradictions, later additions and forgeries, and more. Particularly the hosts focus on the tale of the resurrection of Jesus. I don't have much to add here in way of commentary. I selected this clip for my friend because she believes in biblical inerrancy. While I never can and will never claim that I can disprove her god (or any god), I can confidently state that there are errors (many errors) in the bible based on nothing more than elementary logic and reason.

By the way, if you are interested in biblical truths and how scholars go about determining what the original books of the bible really said, I recommend you read Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart Ehlman. I read this novel a few weeks ago and I loved it. It is a very interesting read and I learned many things I didn't know about Christianity, religious history, and textual criticism. And the book is not anti-Christian or pro-atheism by any means at all. I think it presents a very unbiased, unprejudiced analysis and I recommend it for both believers and non-believers.






This clip, split into two videos, discusses dogmatic religious mindsets. The host, Matt, makes a very interesting observation about how gods have gotten less and less specific over time. Many early religions, such as Greek mythology, had many very specific gods fulfilling very specific purposes in the world, such as bringing out the sun or controlling the seas. Religion seems to have "evolved" (pun intended) into the worship of less gods that are extremely ill-defined. Most believers around the world today are monotheists (believe in and worship only a single god). When they tell me that their god is good and I find an example of an evil action their god was said to have done in their holy text, I usually get an answer like "well he's mysterious".

The discussion continues with the caller noting that when you destroy a religious, dogmatic mindset (due to overwhelming evidence), it seems that the believer will just replace it with another dogma. The co-host Jenn adds that she thinks its because these people have some sort of "childish need for certainty in their lives", which is a view that I happen to agree with. Science will never be able to tell us everything and I happily admit that I don't know everything, including the fact that I don't know if there are any gods or not. I just don't believe that any exist. But belief in something and knowledge of something (including claiming to know) are very different. Perhaps people cling to religious dogma because they are afraid of not knowing what happens after they die (I would argue that no one knows that actually), or afraid of not having an all powerful being in the sky that's always looking out for them. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes by Carl Sagan. A view that I concur strongly with.

For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

In the second part, Matt goes on to discuss how his position on his atheism would change when/if he is presented with extraordinary evidence to support an extraordinary claim for some supernatural power. Personally I think that anyone, whether they are a theist, atheist, or something else, who would deny or reject sufficient contradictory evidence to their stance is a complete and utter fool. Any ideological system, whether religious, political, or something else makes any sort of statement that the believer is not allowed to question its views or assertions should be immediately questioned. For me, whenever I am told not to question something it immediately sets off my "bullshit sensor" and I am much, much less likely to believe whatever it is I'm being told not to question.



I may have mentioned this earlier this year when I started my posts on religion. But my enemy is not religion. I have identified my enemy as dogma. I've come to reason and believe that dogma is responsible for so many evils in this world. Its responsible for the massacre of millions throughout religious wars like the Crusades. Its responsible for medical doctors being murdered in cold blood for practicing abortions. Its responsible for terrorists flying airplanes into buildings and bombings across the world every day. Its responsible for the merciless torture and slaughter of Jewish and other minority groups at the hands of Nazi Germany. There is nothing, nothing positive about enslaving your mind to anything or anyone, regardless of whether that force is good, evil, or something in between. Part of the reason I continue to write about religious topics in my blog is for the hope that by doing so, maybe I can weaken dogma's cold grip on people just a little bit more. Dogma isn't going to disappear overnight and it probably will always exist in some form somewhere, but that's no reason for me to not even attempt to defeat it.