(June 29, 2016 at 2:23 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: It is very easy to judge preindustrial social structures from this side of the industrial revolution.
But it is necessary when those same bronze age societies values are supposed to govern our morality, politics and everything else. Yes bronze age societies had poor morality compared to us, that's why the Bible is so low on moral teachings because it was used to confine people to those pre-industrial social structures. Bible or Koran are no evidence of superior morality and to rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
