(June 24, 2022 at 10:08 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Does it actually matter whether we trust in the reliability of magic book to tell us what god commands?
Well, if something must be a certain way solely because one person (God) commands it, then it would need to have very good credibility that it really came from him. This way it might have come from him but was changed through centuries of oral re-telling or just completely made up.
(June 24, 2022 at 10:08 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: The thing about moral claims, is that their purported issuer and accuracy of transmission is irrelevant to the truth of the moral claim.
But this is not what believers in the so-called objective morality from the Bible claim. They claim that something is good or bad simply because God says it is that way, and not if it makes sense or not.
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"
