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WillowOne's Positions

Biblical Morality

My Positions

  1. The Bible is not a reliable moral guide. It commands, permits or praises acts (genocide, slavery, the stoning of children, the killing of apostates and witches) that any modern reader, including the believer, recognises as evil.
  2. The believer who sets those passages aside as "context" is grading the book with a moral sense that comes from outside it. So am I. That concedes that morality does not come from the book.
  3. The good parts (the golden rule, the Sermon on the Mount, Micah 6:8) are good, and are also found earlier and elsewhere. We keep them because they are good, not because of where they are written.

Notes

  1. The record, briefly. God orders the Midianite boys and women killed and the virgin girls kept (Numbers 31:17–18), the Amalekites destroyed down to the infants and the livestock (1 Samuel 15:3), and the cities of Canaan emptied of everything that breathes (Deuteronomy 20:16–17). Slavery is regulated, not condemned: foreigners may be bought and bequeathed as property (Leviticus 25:44–46), and a slave may be beaten to death provided he lingers a day or two (Exodus 21:20–21). A disobedient son is to be stoned by the town (Deuteronomy 21:18–21), a rape victim married to her rapist (22:28–29), a family member who suggests another god killed by his own relatives (13:6–10), a man who gathers sticks on the Sabbath executed (Numbers 15:32–36). Forty-two children are mauled by bears for mocking a prophet's baldness (2 Kings 2:23–24). The flood and the tenth plague are the killing of every infant in a region, twice. Steve Wells has counted the rest in Drunk with Blood.
  2. The New Testament does not repeal it. Jesus says not one jot of the law will pass (Matthew 5:18), and talks of Hell more than anyone else in the book. Slaves are told to obey their masters (Ephesians 6:5; 1 Timothy 6:1; 1 Peter 2:18). Women are to keep silent (1 Timothy 2:12). The Sermon on the Mount is genuinely fine, and its author also said he came not to bring peace but a sword. The text is mixed because it was written by many people over a long time, which is what one would expect of a human book and not of a divine one.
  3. The "context" defence proves my point. Told that these passages were for their time, that the Canaanites were wicked, that slavery then was "different", the honest reply is: how do you know? Not from the text, which presents the killings as commanded and the slavery as fine. The believer knows these things are wrong by the same means I do, a moral sense produced by evolution, culture and reflection (Morality), and then applies it to decide which verses count. This is Cherry-picking with a good conscience, and it means the book is being judged by the reader rather than the reader by the book. The Euthyphro Dilemma has the same shape: if we can tell that a divine command is bad, goodness is not the same thing as being commanded.
  4. The history confirms it. Christians were on both sides of abolition, and the slaveholders had the better of the proof-texting; the Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 to defend slavery from scripture and apologised for it in 1995. The moral zeitgeist moved, and the reading moved with it, which is the pattern Richard Dawkins describes in The God Delusion: the book stays still and the interpretation follows the culture, always a generation behind.
  5. The good is older than the book. The golden rule is in Confucius, in Hillel, in Isocrates, and in every society that has had to live together, because it is the obvious solution to the problem of living together. Micah's "do justly, love mercy, walk humbly" is excellent advice, and it is advice, which can be assessed on its merits like any other. I take it on those merits. What I decline to take is the rest of the package on the strength of the parts that are good.
  6. Steelman. The best apologetic reply (Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?) argues that the laws were improvements on surrounding cultures, that the conquest language is hyperbole, and that God accommodated hard hearts. Granting all three, an omnipotent moral teacher who could say "love your enemies" could also have said "do not own people", and did not, in a book the slaveholders read.

Sources

  • Steve Wells, Drunk with Blood: God's Killings in the Bible (2010; 2nd ed. 2013)
  • Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), chapter 7, "The 'Good' Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist"
  • Avalos, H., Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship (2011)
  • Copan, P., Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (2011), the apologetic case
  • Southern Baptist Convention, Resolution on Racial Reconciliation on the 150th Anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention (1995)

Also see