What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[SteelCurtain]

I honestly have no clue what you mean about editing out the word "idea" lol. I don't remember editing, but if I did it was to better explain what I meant.

Your paraphrase of me left out the word "idea," which was very important to my meaning. I wasn't saying that this event happened, I was saying that the idea of the event is important as it relates to the Bible as a moral document.

It would not be ok to kill Onan. Even if they thought it would be.

What I was saying was to consider the different way in which people wrote and talked back then. They wrote "God killed Onan." Does this mean God actually killed Onan? Does this mean that Onan even existed? In my opinion, no. This means that allegory was very popular back then and they were telling a parable to convey a particular message. That message being, it is immoral to behave in the way this character did. You have to put yourself back in their time to understand why they wrote things the way they did, and that's what I was telling Rhythm.

And what I am saying is that you cannot remove the way they wrote and talked completely from their morality. And, by context, the morality preached by the Bible, OT and NT. The cherry picking is seriously disconcerting.

It's also important to keep in mind that God did not write the OT. If He did, we would claim the bible and the OT as perfect, but we don't. We do not claim the bible as infallible. The bible is about God, but it is written through the filter of man.

It is not perfect. So to address your point, God did not necessarily think this was a good way to communicate with that society. He did not write it. That society thought this was a good way to communicate with that society. They were the ones who wrote it in accordance to their imperfect perception of God.

So when does this magically stop? Is the New Testament a good way to communicate with our society? Do you understand why using this argument to explain away the uncomfortable shit is dubious while accepting the stuff that you want to apply to contemporary life?

I don't understand why my bolded quote is so damaging. Can you clarify?

The idea that it's never okay to punish someone with death is in vehement disagreement with a lot of the book you hold so dear. And it flies in the face of the idea that morality doesn't shift.

The over arching point is that you are assuming that your current version of morality is perfect and complete. We have it now, whereas those people in the Bronze Ages and Middle Ages were just clueless fools just trying the best they could. But right now, in the modern world, we have morality figured out. And it won't change in the future.

I guarantee it will change. You brought up an interesting point, earlier. If some of the more terrible predictions of dystopia in the future come true, an entirely different moral landscape will emerge. We don't experience what that is right now, and a person born into that world with no outside perspective will be just as sure that they have it right as you and I are now. That doesn't make either of us right. It makes morality subjective.