Moral standards

[Jenny A]

@ Godsrevolt:

I don't think I have anything of value to add to the question of where atheists get their morals. That position has be rather ably put forward for the last seven pages.

What I'd like to point out is that Christians very obviously do not get the bulk of their morals from the god or the bible. And I'm very glad you don't, just puzzled that you don't realize it.

The New Testament does not contain a body of law in the sense the the OT does, but it does contain moral advice that no Christian I ever met either follows or as far as I can tell attempts to follow. These moral prescripts including giving away everything to the poor and turning the other cheek. I don't think a man who tried to follow such advice would live long. If Christians did, they would have died out long ago and we'd all be Muslim or something else.

The Old Testament contains some pretty ugly rules supposedly laid down by god. These include killing women for being raped, enslaving foreign nationals forever and one's own for seven years, capital punishment for a variety of relatively minor offenses, stoning as good method of execution, and a variety of things that turn our modern Western moral stomachs but still go on and are considered moral in other parts of the world. Similar things were commonplace during the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance in Western Christian culture. Torturing people and burning people to death was all the rage for a while.

If there were absolute standards handed down by god, I don't think this kind of change in morals over time among Christians would be possible. It's human society, not some absolute set of moral standards that's changing. Theologians look for new ways of interpreting old texts to allow for new moral ideas. But it is societal morals that lead the way, not the religious texts. So while you may use the bible or your understanding of god to bolster your own idea of morality, you obviously are getting your morality from humanity, the same as the rest of us.

Interestingly, the bible is most notably concerned with a type of morality, atheists don't recognize at all, i.e. doing right by god. How when and why to make sacrifices, how to treat holy objects, who can and can't preform various kinds of worship, how to conduct oneself on the Sabbath, make up the bulk of the legal/moral material in the bible. The over arching theme is that god has chosen one people, the Hebrews, and that if the Hebrews worship properly and do not stray to worship other gods, all will go well for them. Adapting these rules to modern society has been the theological work of many many lifetimes of rabbis.

The rules are rather different, but the New Testament is also primarily concerned with how one gets right with god, rather than how one is right with one's fellow human beings. Whereas the OT stresses physical things to be done, the NT stresses belief itself and contrition. Following all the rules of the OT will get you precisely no where with the NT god. Apparently god too, changes the rules to fit the times.

This suggests to me that the rules for getting right with god are also of human origin.