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I dropped this one in another forum, but I kept it on file because I liked what I managed to type, that day.
I Wrote:
[(OP asked me "Are you sure? To be positive we'd probably have to translate directly from Hebrew.")]
Yes, I'm pretty sure. I've read quite a few books on the subject by Hebrew scholars, and it's why I cited from Young's Literal Translation, as well as citing commonly-known elements of the Patriarchal culture that was ancient Israel. It's really not hard to understand their point of view, for that time and place, but by today's standards, in which women are independent people and full citizens, it's hard to justify (to put it mildly). I'm not even especially mad at the ancient Hebrews for seeing things that way... but to claim that the Holy Bible is a moral guidebook for all time and all peoples, while it contains the Bronze Age values of slavery, females as effective chattel, and genocide by divine command, I'd say it's good evidence that no God wrote that book.
As to the evolved-empathy/morality discussion...you're quite right. Like many concepts which are fuzzy by nature, the notion of morality can break down along the edges. How DO we settle big issues of morality on more than the personal-behavior scale? We developed our sense of moral empathy for a hunter-gatherer tribe of 50-200 people; stretching that sense to include ever-larger groups (including those Others, capital O, we often instinctively fear) can often be problematic. For instance-- my country (USA) is currently bombing other countries in an attempt to kill those who seek to do harm to our people and our allies... but in the process we often, despite our best efforts, cause "collateral" damage. To me, this is clearly immoral. Is it SO immoral that it warrants cessation of the activity? I cannot say for sure, despite my instinctive opinion about it. That is for society to decide as a whole through the democratic process of electing leaders who tell us what they will do about it. My point here is that applying personal concepts of morality to group behaviors gets shaky very quickly, and to me verifies the principle that morality is not objective, but subjective according to each person and each society.
But that brings us to the point about "obey the law or go to jail". It is entirely about the basis of that moral authority. When our Founding Fathers wrote a letter to the King of England, George III, to tell him why we were rebelling (we call it the Declaration of Independence) against what King George and all people before him called "the Divine Right of Kings", meaning that God Himself had supposedly given the King the right to determine what happened to us, we declared, that no... the right to govern comes from "the consent of the governed". Either the People consent to be ruled, or the rulership is tyranny and rightfully rebelled against.
We then spelled out a few "unalienable" (not an actual word, but I love the poetry of it) rights of all men, then defined them specifically a few years later in the Bill of Rights, amended to our Constitution. Since then, other democracies have formed and spelled out similar concepts. An individual may chafe against the rules of his society, but each of us has the power to convince others of the rightness of his cause, and to advocate for change through the power of the ballot box. Each of us has a representative to whom he may complain if a policy or law is deemed unfair. We can and do change laws and expand rights to new groups which were previously prejudiced against silent/powerless minorities, or which prove to be economically or otherwise unfair.
But when it comes to God, as defined in your Bible, you're asking me to take the Bronze Age values clearly enshrined in book form, claiming to be from an eternal Creator of the Universe, and apply it as an unquestionable moral guide. Furthermore, you're claiming that this Bible defines God in a way that allows Him to make moral demands of us that are (to the unbiased, outside observer from any other religion or irreligion) clearly the product of the thinking of one particular tribal culture, and claiming that it is somehow His right to do so at gunpoint. If I take you at your word, that there is such a Being (and not the others' word that Krishna or Allah or Marduk or Thor have particular demands to make of me), then this Being is repugnant to my sense of basic morality. A God that would demand that I guess which holy book is right, that I obey the single book out of the options that I chose to guess is right, OR ELSE BURN, is indistinguishable, to me, from a rapist who claims the right because he is more powerful than his victim. To claim that the eternal Creator of the Universe cares how one species of mammal on one planet out of billions in the universe has sex may have made sense to people in the Bronze Age, when people didn't know what germs were or where the sun went at night, I can understand... but it's astounding to me that people still are able to think this is okay in the 21st century.
A Christian told me: if you were saved you cant lose your salvation. you're sealed with the Holy Ghost I replied: Can I refuse? Because I find the entire concept of vicarious blood sacrifice atonement to be morally abhorrent, the concept of holding flawed creatures permanently accountable for social misbehaviors and thought crimes to be morally abhorrent, and the concept of calling something "free" when it comes with the strings of subjugation and obedience perhaps the most morally abhorrent of all... and that's without even going into the history of justifying genocide, slavery, rape, misogyny, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech which has been attributed by your own scriptures to your deity. I want a refund. I would burn happily rather than serve the monster you profess to love.
