To be honest, that scares me on some level. From all appearances, you seem like a kind and honest person, so I would highly doubt you would do anything crazy. However, not everyone is like you. I don’t think I need to go into details because I am sure we are all aware of horrific acts in recent history that have been carried out by people who believe they are fulfilling God’s will.
So how do we approach this issue?
Humans throughout history have done things just like the chimps that were considered fine in their own context. Slavery was normal for most civilizations throughout history. We feel very different today. We are the exception here. I’d like to think we are actually right to reject slavery today. I feel your view on morality just trivializes it. Things aren’t “really wrong” or “really right.” Its a “might is right”, I hope everyone agrees with me type outlook. Morality is akin to opinion. People just take it more seriously than which flavor of ice cream isn the best but I can’t see reducing morality to opinion as a good thing. This is why I feel atheism as a philosophy trivializes the Imago Dei. Atheists themselves can be very moral and champion the value of human life but as far and their world view goes, this is all smoke and mirrors to me. I can’t separate it from nihilism or the cosmic nothingness that will permeate the universe the next gazillion years.
I find @Daniel_Fisher accurate here:
The other problem, if we assume an atheist world view and assume for the argument that we are limiting our critique to the moral code created by that culture… is that the ancient Israelites had just as much right to invent their own moral code, and therefore judge your moral code as problematic. You can say their morality is evil, they can say the same about yours.
I find this modern approach to morality to be nothing more than relativism. I can easily see how it comforts some people and allows them to skirt their responsibility to their Creator.
Ca you provide an example? The law is anyone who is 18+ can vote. Are there cases where people under 18 are allowed to vote? The law is 21+ to buy alcohol. People who sell alcohol to minors break the law 100% of the time.
That Deity is your savior, all good things stem from Him, that Deity is wiser than you and more trustworthy than fickle human standards that change from place to place and time to time?
The challenge is not shouldI believe God or myself. That is a no-brainer for Christians. It’s God 100% of the time every time. The challenge is “did God really say that?” and “how do I understand this as part of my sacred scripture?”.
The issue is not black and white.
[1] Its not what Jesus said vs what we believe today.
Its what we think Jesus said vs what we believe today.
[2] [1] Its not what Jesus meant vs what we believe today.
Its what we think Jesus meant vs what we believe today.
[3] What I believe today is a combination of all my life experiences: this includes what Jesus said and everything else. The society I live in and background views I grew up with were influenced by Jesus of Nazareth.
There is a spiraling symbiotic relationship in there somewhere. We cannot be moral in a vacuum.
My experiences, my brain, my gut, my emotions, my whole human self (no doubt influenced by my experience in a christian culture in a specific life. setting) tell me rape and torture is wrong. I believe the words of Jesus and his life of sacrifice and calling to higher standards 1,000,000 percent teach that.
So when I read a gospel from a persecuted community in the middle of the Roman-Jewish war that probable underwent persecution by Jews and Gentiles beforehand, and I realize there is significant Markan redaction in the Gospel and 13, I have to question if God really directly intervened and used Rome to starve and torture so many of his own people? Hundreds of crucifixions a day, mass famine to where mothers are reported (apocryphally?) as eating their young. I have to judge scripture by other scripture as well. I who am ubut dust and ashes has to ask, “Shall not the Lord of all earth do what is right?”
22 So the men turned from there and went toward Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord.[f] 23 Then Abraham came near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” 26 And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” 27 Abraham answered, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to my lord, I who am but dust and ashes. 28 Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” 29 Again he spoke to him, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” 30 Then he said, “Oh, do not let my lord be angry if I speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” 31 He said, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to my lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” 32 Then he said, “Oh, do not let my lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.”33 And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.
When I read Mark I read it with how Mark is spinning Jesus. For example, I don’t think Jesus really taught in parables to confuse people. He would be a horrible teacher if so. I see this as a persecuted Christian community. If I were in a war zone I might pray for peace but I might also ask God to crush my enemies as well. That is how I see Mark.
There are a number of indications within the Gospel that point towards the Markan audience enduring an actual situation of persecution or a relationship characterized by tension or alienation from society as a whole (Mk 13.13 ; and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.). The Gospel’s ‘secrecy motif’ (Mk 1.24f, 34, 44; 3.11f; 5.43; 7.24, 36; 8.30; 9.9), the sharp divisions between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (4.11, 21-25, 34; 7.17) and emphasis on pre-destination (4.10-12: where knowledge is revealed to the few and concealed from the majority), are typical of groups who see themselves as persecuted (4.16-17; 8.34-38; 10.30, 38, 39; 13.9-13). . . . The Gospel substantially reflects their need for instruction, comfort, support and encouragement. The evangelist, therefore, constructed and focused his Gospel with the purpose of deepening the community’s faith, ameliorating any Judaizing influences and preparing them for the Gentile mission." Jennifer Wilkinson: Mark and His Gentile Audience…
I think God allowed the Roman-Jewish war, not caused it directly as an act of Judgement. If God himself said I did this I would have to accept it. But I have more faith in my understanding of goodness (gleaned from the Bible and personal experience) and in my experiences with God, than I do Mark is writing indisputable facts. He is comforting a persecuted community in the middle of it by adapting the teachings of Jesus. I’d say at a hyperbolic presentation.
It scares me you think your subjective sense of morality (which is dependent upon where and when you were born, to those with whom you’ve interacted with and those you did not, and is quite fickle) is superior to God’s (assuming we knew what this God actually commanded).
That is just your opinion. The people committing them think it was righteous. That is just their opinion. You shouldn’t be so judgmental and assume they should believe and act like you or they are wrong or horrific for not doing so. You are being intolerant of their religion. ← My opinion.
We can’t when morality is just an opinion. If I liked cinnamon toast crunch and you liked captain crunch, we could have a battle of wits over which is better for 2 minutes but there is no real reason to carry on an actual discussion over mere opinion.
Sure, moral decisions do impact everyone’s quality of life but why that matters or why anyone’s quality of life is important is again just opinion. Without God, all roads lead to nihilism for me. Anything else is playing pretend.
I do understand that blind, literalist devotion to a 2,000 year old texts is dangerous.
But what if it isn’t “just” T’s opinion? It’s also the opinion of a fairly large segment of human society today - some of which would trace that opinion back into ostensible justification as a command they find in sacred writ inspired by Deity, and others (who don’t share belief in that Deity) may attribute it just to subjective human culture. But either way - a large body of people adhere to it now. Granted, this doesn’t help us adjudicate across all history or over all cultures - such as for our favorite example: the WW2 Nazis. Or at least not to the satisfaction of those who want to insist that all morality be universally objective over all time and cultures before they will recognize it as authentic.
But yet - I’m guessing that most agnostics have no problem at all taking the subjective morality so many of us adhere to today and applying it to reach the conclusion that things like slavery and Naziism are indeed wrong - and were wrong then as they did them. And yet according to those who push the harder line of the “morality can only be objective or else non-existent”, people like these moralizing agnostics shouldn’t even exist, right? Or we imagine them to be ‘cheaters’ who are really feeding on the fumes of religious morality but then refusing to acknowledge any such influence?
To me this is an interesting exchange to see how subjective morality might have some legitimate - even needed place in culture despite the believers wish to evict it from our considerations as so much nonsense. As a believer myself, I’ve often been among the eviction crew myself - but I remain curious and open to how this might work. On the side of the “objective-only” moralizers I’ve heard one Jewish rabbi refer to such subjective morality as “cut-flower ethics” I.e. - sure, you can inherit, and then cut away a set of ethics from the wider religious culture much like clipping a flower to put in a vase on your table. But the flower taken away from the soil won’t be lasting long, and why should your kids adhere to any of the same ethics that you might promote to them? So such morality - divorced from it’s true source must soon fade into the cultural chaos of Judges: “…and they all did what was right in their own eyes.”
But on the other hand, there seems to be something healthy - even Christian about acknowledging the subjectivity of my own perspectives, even as curated to me by my own religion and sacred writ. To abandon that humility seems to me a departure from wisdom. Besides, shouldn’t we rejoice that scriptures seem to expect all humanity to have some rudimentary capacity for judgment in place that we’re expected to exercise for discernment? We are asked to “taste and see” - to judge for ourselves. Paul even expects his own readers to “judge for themselves…” regarding a man’s long hair! And they would have been using their commonly available cultural and subjectively formed morality to reach the conclusion he wanted at that time.
It is interesting that you describe this as a feeling.
I am just being a realist about it and recognizing how morality actually works. Morality is based on our subjective judgments, such as your subjective opinion of the problems you see with my approach.
I also don’t see why morality should be based on “because someone wrote it in a book 2,500 years ago”.
A bit from the blog I mentioned earlier. The first point can’t be repeated enough.
Luckily, I can differentiate between the two. I’ve embraced the subjective character of the human experience and think it adds value to life. I don’t believe that something has to be objective in order to have meaning. The love I have for my family is entirely subjective, and yet it is one of the most amazing things there is.
I’ve heard the pitch before.
What we have is what some humans wrote in a book 2,500 years ago.
Then following a moral code described by a religion is subjective.
No. I am asking how we address these facts.
Why not?
Because we held them to an objective morality that they were bound to obey regardless of what society they came from, no? We didn’t allow them the luxury of appealing to their own personal subjective morality, or that of their culture and nation’s subjective morality, no?
Why thank you! Nicest thing anyone has ever said about me… 
You are of course correct. I would only hasten to add that there are plenty more horrific acts in recent history - plenty are in our history books, and there are plenty that I am personally aware of - that have been carried out by people who could have cared less what God thought about their actions, who were not restrained by any fear of God or eternal consequences of their actions, or who felt justified in their actions through their non-religious humanist philosophy or moral code.
But I don’t let that detract from what you said also, I do absoluely concur.
How do we approach the issue? With care and caution, with open minds and reasonableness, and yet being utterly devoted to what is true, and with humility informed by love, would be my suggestion.
But you are correct, there is a real and present danger there and no end of examples. And of course I can understand your concern in general - After all, I am from a religion that holds up as one of its highest examples of faith that should be emulated: a man who was willing to go against every moral, personal, and loving instinct and rational thought within in him in order to kill his adolescent son because God told him to. So if you were to ask: yes, I would do my best to do exactly what Abraham did if I were utterly convinced that such was in fact the very command of God.
Of course I can affirm that God would never do such a thing - he didn’t even follow through with it the first time, of course. But your point remains, how can you be confident in me if, bottom line, I would be willing to do literally anything if I believed I was fulfilling God’s will? How would you feel safe meeting me for lunch one day if you really believed I was that unloosed, untethered from basic human morality or rationality, if as I affirm, I literally would be willing to do anything whatsoever if I were convinced it were God’s will?
The full answer is probably a very long discussion (that I’d be happy to have on another thread if you are interested)… but the short answer is that, just as quickly as I would hypothetically be willing to follow Abraham’s hypothetical example if hypothetically I believed God directed me to do so, I must be just as quick to follow all the commands that aren’t hypothetical - that of Jesus to love my neighbor, to pray for those who persecute me, to consider others more important than myself, to give to the poor, to show kindness, to sacrifice for others, and the like.
Those are the examples I was thinking of. Hence why, if there’s a similar law that says, “No one who isn’t an eternal deity is allowed to do X…” I fail to see the criticism that this is no longer an objective law because it applies differently to different entities.
Ok, I’m tracking and I can understand that, even if I demur… thanks for the clarifications.
But my basic concern remains… And I’m genuinely asking to understand, not trying to trap you or anything… but how does this not, exactly, devolve into,
“Everything Jesus said in the Gospel of Mark that I agree with is genuine Jesus.”
“Everything Jesus said in the Gospel of Mark that I disagree with… well, that was the stuff Mark added…”
Very appreciated, thank you!
But before I take too much credit for such feats of clairvoyance, I must point out to any third party that you did unfortunately cut off my quote, and so it may not be obvious to someone reading this comment alone that I was explicitly referencing the first commandment. For anyone else reading, I should confess I was not actually exercising any mind-reading abilities, I was merely paraphrasing the first commandment with a touch of Deuteronomy 6 tossed in for good measure. My apologies to anyone who was misled or who unwittingly missed my allusion.
What objective morality?
They were held accountable to the subjective morality of Western culture.
However, you would conclude those same actions were fully justified if someone wrote in a book that God commanded it.
In an earlier post you said:
“The God as portrayed in the Bible is the giver of said human law, and is not bound himself to follow the specific commands he gave humans to abide by. Those laws aren’t arbitrary, but they are the specific application of said universal objective moral law that God command for humans to follow. The critique that he doesn’t follow the laws he told humans to follow is a bit of an empty critique.”
So it is entirely possible for God to give a command that contradicts “to love my neighbor, to pray for those who persecute me, to consider others more important than myself, to give to the poor, to show kindness, to sacrifice for others, and the like.”
You have also said that you can’t second guess these commands, no matter how deeply it goes against your own inner sense of morality.
Of course I wouldn’t, that would be ridiculous.
Me: “Torturing kittens is wrong.”
You: “My kid brother just wrote a book and in it he said that God commanded it.”
Me: “Oh! OK. I guess torturing kittens is fully justified, then.” 
Literally contradicts? no. appears to contradict? absolutely. Not to mention there will of course be all sorts of complex moral dilemmas even in the commands of God we already have (but what moral code won’t have that?) Welcome to real life. Military members have to do this all the time - when called upon by their own command authority, they may have to aim downrange and make their absolute best effort to kill the maximum number of humans on the other side of the battlefield. But if the enemy surrenders are they expected by the law of man and of God to show genuine love, care, kindness, concern for enemy’s health, safety, comfort, etc.? Absolutely.
Contradiction? I would say not. Extraordinarily complicated? Certainly.
Maybe it is my being in the military, but this doesn’t seem extraordinarily odd even in a human realm. My profile picture is that of a ballistic missile submarine, a machine whose purpose is, if called upon, to rain down nuclear destruction killing thousands if not millions of people. The very thought of doing so, trust me, was deeply agianst my own sense of morality and that of every sailor on those boats.
But even so… all my time underway on those submarines… it was not lost on me or any of my colleauges… if we were ever ordered to launch said weapons… well, your own words are just about perfect… “you can’t second guess these commands, no matter how deeply it goes against your own inner sense of morality.”
I think you would appreciate the absolute admonition Longman gives against the church ever engaging in OT warfare. Let me look up the clip…
starts at 56:52 and goes for a couple minutes
I understand many people believe the same thing or are of the same opinion as T. I’m not inclined to acts of terror in God’s name myself but these are acts of bravery and faith to those committing them. Who is to say who is right if it’s all subjective? Reducing this to a popularity contest is man’s attempt to live in a world without God. Might as well be a chimp. Not only that, but the people committing these acts hardly think of them as subjective things. One isn’t going to strap a bomb to your chest over which song is the best. Neither am I going to be upset if you like and listen to Taylor Swift. I will secretly join you. But if you kick a child I am treating what you did on another level. Maybe subjective/objective aren’t the best terms, maybe we need better ones, but I can’t see how making morality ultimately opinion doesn’t render human life meaningless.
Truth isn’t a popularity contest. Neither should morality be. That is what it is being reduced to. A subjective popularity contest. By that token chattel slavery in the US was ethical and proper for a long time. It was the consensus opinion. There is no way around this. 10 subjective opinions are just that. A lot of people liking a tv show doesn’t mean it’s good or bad or I should like it. I might want to consider it because of the popularity but I wouldn’t be bad or evil for disagreeing. It just means 10 people like the show. 10 people thinking murder is bad doesn’t make it bad. It just means 10 people think it’s bad. How is that different if it’s just mere opinion. Argument ad populum doesn’t work. And we cannot adjudicate across the world today, let alone Nazi Germany or virtually every civilization throughout history that had slaves and treated women and children very poorly by today’s standards. This behavior is also still very normal in some parts of the world and it was considered proper at the time (if anyone wants to be contentious about this, we have no other practice–nor do the churches of God")
I stated from the beginning I do not believe my own personal morality is objectively true in and of itself. My thoughts and views are not synonymous with God’s. And even if the Bible was inerrant, my interpretation and world view would not be. I subjectively live and try to ascertain and follow what is objectively right and wrong. I try to get Jesus right the best I can. Deep down I praise, I blame, I extol and I operate as if morality were real things and that people truly have inalienable rights and value. I think most other people do the same. I don’t think these things are made up. They are eternally true because we are made in God’s image. Without this we are nothing more than animals. Some people are okay with that. To me, it makes life sub-human.
I think we all have subjective morality in a sense. We all are conditioned by our environment and some Christians confuse their views and their interpretation of scripture with God’s views and thoughts, but my point is unless there is some objective standard we are striving towards, that the Holy Spirit is moving us towards, I find in the end it all reduces to nothing. If God doesn’t exist I firmly believe most of the world should just kill themselves. Reality would be utterly cruel and absurd and pointless. Biology compels us otherwise. We can also pretend morality is subjective until someone wrongs us or hurts someone we love. Then the philosophy gloves come off and our true colors come out. Our worldview should be something we can live by.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t objective morality. It just means we are not God and we need to do the best we can to ascertain what that is. Atheism reduces morality to “Coke or Pepsi.”. If we want to be a realist and recognize how morality actually works, we should realize this is not how it works in the real world. Moral values are treated as real things. So real people go to war over them. We truly abhor some actions and truly esteem others.
Surely we can agree that being moral is the most important aspect of being human? How can the most important aspect of human life be ultimately subjective and mere opinion? That is to deny the value of human life in my mind.
No one else does. As you know that is a caricature. The argument is God wrote that book so following it is following God. But I am not a literalist, I am not an inerrancy advocate and even if the Bible was the latter, in no way could I interpret it perfectly. It surely looks human in parts. But surely attempting to follow a guide from an objective source would be bette than blindly following the whims of culture, genes and humanity. The question then becomes is that written by God? And if so, in what sense.
I would say that is exactly why morality ultimately should not be subjective. Because then humans have no ontological worth.
Yet those genes have produced so much diversity and disagreement. Since our morality is dictated by genes and things so far outside our control, wouldn’t that be arbitrary? The whims of random evolutionary processes. How much more arbitrary can it get that that?
But yes, your arguments for some underlying moral core are the same ones theists would argue for morality being objective. God wanted us to evolve in a certain way so reciprocal altruism and social cooperation would be wired in. If we are just the product of genes then morality is arbitrary in a sense. It’s dictated by whatever random route evolution took and tells us to believe. We would have no reason to believe our moral thoughts are even true. They just are the product of blind, random chance. Why should I trust that?
I find this the most ironic of your three arguments. First let me point out the official name: argumentum ad populum. But more importantly, most humans are in broad agreement on almost all of the basics of religious belief and that moral values are real and binding. So your own reasoning works against itself as here you are an atheist and subjective moralist.
If you look at the broadest possible categories this may be true. But that then is also equally an argument for an objective moral standard that we all aspire to.
I think Jesus said a lot of piercing things that I don’t follow or live up to. His expectations and ethical standards are beyond what I can or seem to be willing to follow. It doesn’t make me feel good. I am fine with giving what the gospels attribute to Jesus the benefit of the doubt in most cases (the sayings material in John I do strongly wonder about compared to the synoptic portrait) but not when it comes to God doing something like actively causing Rome to destroy his temple and cause so much pain and suffering. Allowing it (via free will) is one thing, but actively causing it is another. It hardly lives up to Jesus on the cross (“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”) It is the exit opposites. So it’s a battle between my thoughts and scripture but my thoughts are a product of both scripture (most importantly Jesus) and my experiences. It’s also an issue of scripture vs scripture.
I have read a ton of critical scholarship as well. I wish I could just turn it off when I read the Bible but its very difficult to do so…
The meaning of what it is to be human runs into a problem when it is said to be purely subjective.
Take eating meat as an example. It’s one thing to hold a personal belief on the subject of eating meat and it’s relation to what it means to be a human being, while admitting this is something that people can disagree on because of the complexity of how a person comes to hold such a belief.
While it seems like a win-win to hold to a view that human meaning is purely subjective, it doesn’t deliver any kind of real meaning.
Sort of like that 1998 movie What Dreams May Come, a heaven of my own making is a true picture of hell.
This brought up an issue in my brain. I have no idea how anyone can look at the history of life on this planet and think that one animal or organism dying (whether human, ant or bacteria) actually has any real meaning at all in the long history of earth. Without being made in the Imago Dei our insignificance cannot be overstated.
I struggle with how a loving God could have created a world this way where life is predicated on the destruction of other life, let alone pretending any of that life has value and meaning without God. I tend to sway towards “we are here to utilize and overcome our biology.” Some seem to think that is all we are and that it still makes sense to find meaning.
I mean honestly, how many living organisms die in a single day on this planet? The number is astronomical. If we are just animals what is the ultimate significance of a divide bomber gets a few extra in Gods name? It’s like a trillionaire losing two quarters.
Without God, any meaning or purpose to life is just a delusion of the highest order. Some atheists think theists are delusional about God. They should take their own medicine about life, meaning and morality. Or make sure they tell their kids how insignificant they truly are before tucking them in tonight. Sweet dreams.
Appreciated, thanks. For what it is worth, though, balancing a God who brings judgment and a God who also forgives are ideas all over the Old Testament, that Jesus regularly also referenced; including his references to the flood and to Sodom… The same Bible that describes God actively sending the Romans as a judgment on Jerusalem also regularly affirmed that the Babylonians and Assyrians were specifically God’s judgment for them a few generations previously. The language of Isaiah 10 is inescapable that the Assyrians were “the rod of my wrath.” “For judgment I have come into the world,” Jesus said, and I doubt one can escape all his warnings of judgment, including his final judgment where he casts those who are not his sheep into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, by suggesting these were accretions only added by the evangelists… Jesus’s warnings and promises about judgments, both in prose and parable, including his own future judgment when he returns in glory, are all too pervasive and ubiquitous for that to be a plausible explanation, I humbly suggest.
But what you are wrestling with is how to balance, embrace the “both/and” of Jesus love and forgiveness with his stern warnings and promises of judgment… something the church has wrestled to understand for generations, so you’re in good company. I’d humbly suggest, though, that the answer is to wrestle and learn how to embrace both, if this really is the character of Jesus, even when it doesn’t make perfect sense in our mind, rather than choose to embrace one and ignore the other to whatever extent.
But sincerely appreciate your thoughts.
If interesting, on this topic, by the way,
The best thing for “muting” the voice of critical scholarship to read the Bible, in my humble opinion, is C. S. Lewis’s article “Fern-Seed and Elephants”, alternately titled, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism.” Lewis expertly walks through the methods and approaches of modern theology (that haven’t changed much since his time), and shows that their methods and conclusions are far less reliable than they seem at first.
One little gem from his article, this is what your thought above reminded me of…
“It is as we glide away from [traditional textual criticism] into reconstructions of a subtler and more ambitious kind that our faith in the method wavers and our faith in Christianity is proportionately corroborated.”
Indeed! There needs to be somebody, right? And of course, for the believer, that ‘somebody’ is God; but meanwhile, in the absence of God directly appearing in person (since Jesus), we are happy (all-too-happy?) to function as God’s proxy in donning the mantle of this authority. And when we’re called on it, we object that we have God behind us - and that to raise any question against our proxyship is to rebel against God. It’s a parallel situation to the YEC inability to distinguish between their own modern understandings and God’s Word itself - even when it is directly pointed out to them, they will immediately pivot to talk about anything else. They can’t fathom that there may be any daylight between God’s infallibility and their own. And it’s this massive blind spot they have which is in plain daylight for everybody else, that causes them to reduce God’s word to nonsense and falsehoods.
But back on the morality question; we feel a frightening insecurity if we have any suspicion that the bogeyman of subjectivity may still be lurking anywhere on the premises. It’s objectivity or bust! And I find it interesting that we (believers) cannot be content to trust that any such objectivity is the domain of God alone. We must imagine ourselves and our views as direct extensions of that infallible and eternally consistent source, I guess, … because … why not? Who doesn’t like the thought that they are the viceroy next to the throne and the intermediary of all infallibility to all the rest of humanity?
The question for me is, if I make my peace with that bogeyman of subjectivity that sends so many religionists screaming from the room, have I really lost anything? If I acknowledge the imposed humility (that was always there anyway, even if I tried to deny it) that I am a culturallly shaped and bound person - isn’t that just an objective truth which only becomes a dangerous ignorance for me if I spend heat and indignation on denying its existence? With subjectivity openly in the room and staring me in the face, have I lost my ability to know that some things are just (and always have been) wrong? I check … and no … my moral indignation and horror at the atrocities of history is still intact. As a believer, you might point out that this is easier and all well-and-fine for me because I still believe in God as a grounding for my morality. Which is true enough, but what I am also acknowledging is that my moral intuitions that steer how I use scriptures / religion / traditions - which parts I promote and bring up a lot, and which ones I ignore or push to the margins of culturalized history - that is a very subjective, and culturally-shaped project. And as such, I am tapping into stuff that my culture at large (believing or not) can and does also tap into.
So is it causing cognitive dissonance for so many, then that even if subjectivity has been domesticated and brought into the room, that people can still be every bit as moral as they were before? And with the inverse also being tragically true - that with subjectivity allegedly banished from the room, we can still be just as immoral as before too! - maybe even more so! After all - as C.S. Lewis aptly observed - words to this effect - nobody is as cruel as a bad man who is also religious!
So, regarding subjectivity, better the dangerous creature that I can at least partially keep an eye on than that I should be in denial of its existence and carrying on as if it won’t be anywhere nearby. If I see it and acknowledge it, I’m less likely to accidentally step on its tail.
But you weren’t. The first commandment (as usually translated into English) is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” It doesn’t say anything about worship, importance, or all other beings. Your attempted paraphrase turns you deity into an arrogant egotistical jerk.
Would it?
You: “Impaling pregnant women on spears is wrong.”
Someone: “Moses wrote a book and in it he said that God commanded it.”
You: Oh! OK. I guess impaling pregnant women on spears was fully justified, then."
Unfortunately, you also cut off the relevant information from this quote also… I did explicitly acknowledge that…
Deuteronomy noting " You shall fear only the Lord your God; and you shall worship Him and swear by His name." You know, the one Jesus himself quoted in Matthew 4?
Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’’”
So, again, I appreciate the credit you are trying to pay me, but I simply cannot take credit if it really belongs to another… I was only borrowing the words of Jesus - we should really give him the credit for turning the “deity into an arrogant egotistical jerk.”
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.