Seeking to properly understand the text in context instead of reading it like a newspaper and assuming "slavery" refers to chattel slavery as practiced in the american south is not "reinterpreting the bible to match your moral standards" but simply practicing good reading technique.

SciPhi,

Let's suppose you're right, and that Old Testament slavery was not chattel slavery. How does that help? The verse I quoted lays it all out: You're the property of your master, and if he beats you fatally, he walks away scot free — as long as it takes you a few days to die.

Chattel slavery or not, that is brutal, despicable, and immoral.

Any decent person reading this knows it is wrong. It's wrong now, and it was wrong when it was written. That's why you (and the folks at christian-thinktank.com) feel the need to downplay Biblical slavery and to pretend that it was something gentler and kinder than what it really was.

It is interesting that you accuse Glenn over at CTT of "down playing slavery". He did nothing of the sort. He just cleared up a lot of the background.

Your morality comes from outside the Bible. Notice that when you see something in the Bible that violates your moral standards, you don't change your standards to match the Bible's, you change your interpretation of the Bible to match your moral standards.

That simply is not true. Seeking to properly understand the text in context instead of reading it like a newspaper and assuming "slavery" referes to chattel slavery as practiced in the american south is not "reinterpreting the bible to match your moral standards" but simply practicing good reading technique.

However, when seen in context, slavery in the Bible was not like that of human property without human rights… I believe the slavery allowed by the Bible is still being practiced in my country, Singapore, in fact.

WinglesS,

If the slavery of the Bible is still being practiced in Singapore, I'd advise you to take the next flight out of Changi Airport.

Exodus 21:20-21:

When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be punished; for the slave is his money.

Any decent person reading this knows it is wrong. It's wrong now, and it was wrong when it was written. That's why you (and the folks at christian-thinktank.com) feel the need to downplay Biblical slavery and to pretend that it was something gentler and kinder than what it really was.

Your morality comes from outside the Bible. Notice that when you see something in the Bible that violates your moral standards, you don't change your standards to match the Bible's, you change your interpretation of the Bible to match your moral standards. This leads to contortions like trying to pretend that the slavery of the Bible was a good thing, a Disneyfied version of the outrage that it really was.

It's not okay to beat someone so badly that they die after three days, regardless of what "the Good Book" says.

If you want evidence that the average Christian doesn't get her morality from the Bible, just point out the various slavery-related passages to her. If she's like most Christians, she won't have been aware of them, and she'll be a bit shocked. She won't be aware of the convoluted arguments that have been developed to justify ignoring parts of the Old Testament law while honoring others. And rather than taking seriously the idea that slavery might be a good thing, since the Bible doesn't condemn it, she'll immediately start looking for a way to reinterpret the Bible so that it doesn't clash with her strong sense that slavery is immoral. I've seen it over and over.

Unfortunately, for Christians and Atheists alike today, the picture we get when the word slavery is mentioned is that of white men enslaving black people in North America. Horrible - I'm sure most would agree, and the thought that the Bible would approve of it would surely make many Christians recoil in horror.

However, when seen in context, slavery in the Bible was not like that of human property without human rights, and was in fact revolutionarily humanitarian for it's time. The Bible wasn't shy about using this word even though in today's context we have words like maid, servant, contracted worker or bonded employee and shy away from applying the word "slave" to anyone. This might have perhaps been because of the limited amount of words that were usable in it's host language. I believe the slavery allowed by the Bible is still being practiced in my country, Singapore, in fact. And it's probably a good economic practice. Just because we don't call it slavery anymore doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

A readup: http://www.christian-thinktank...

I'm trying to see how you're saying something other than "it's too complicated, you wouldn't understand it";

Quite the opposite actually. I assumed if you were unfamiliar with the terms that you would be capable of using Google to look them up.

Dawkins is specifically responding to a claim commonly made that it's impossible to have morality without religion;

Well that is where he is confused. It is possible to have a moral framework without direct revelation, the very idea of Natural Law should tell us that as it goes back to the ancient Greeks, but the criticism, at least in its developed form, is that the meta-ethical foundation that Dawkins wants to provide is problematic, not that atheists can't simply be "good" people.

Are you saying that no one's made this claim? Or that this claim (no morality without the Bible) is wrong?

No doubt some ill informed people have made this claim and ill informed atheists frequently jump to the conclusion that this is the argument being made, but it is possible to be moral without direct revelation. You do not require a Mt Sinai event to know right from wrong.

The problem for Dawkins which he fails to properly address as most atheists do when they get a bee in their bonnet over this is how they can properly ground their moral reasoning.

I did an interview with Peter Singer a while back (currently unreleased) where he commented that it was simply obvious what sort of things are right and worth pursing. I agree totally, but he has no right to such an assumption on a naturalistic worldview, just as Dawkins has no right to such a basic assumption.

Could you give me a brief overview of some reasoning that shows either (a) no one really claims that you need the Bible to be moral (given the common claim that atheists just want to be able to sin, sin, sin, so they reject Christianity),

I'm sure some people have presented this mistaken claim, and i've met atheists who are atheists because it frees them of accountability for their behavior.

(b) you can be moral without the Bible (or without religion at all)?

Oh I didn't claim you could get by without "religion" I just noted that you don't require direct revelation. You can't properly ground a moral system without some assumptions about proper ends for human life. Aristotle picked happiness, but a naturalist can't just pick that as a proper end to life because they deny natural functions and ends exist because of their claims about the atelic nature of lifes origins and evolution.

I'm seeing a lot of hand-waving toward imaginary subtleties

I can't help it if you are unfamiliar with some basic concepts in philosophy and can't use Google to look them up.

I see name-calling ("mental retardation", "angry 15 year old"), but I'm not seeing anything in support of your points.

Actually i'd pretty much settle for you looking the basic terms up in Google before spouting off about how you don't understand a set of ideas that have been around for thousands of years.

That's an astonishing claim.

I don't see why, Slavery in OT israel was not chattel slavery and served a vital social support mechanism for the poor.

Do you have an itemized list of when slavery was, historically speaking, a moral thing? Is it only when history was written by the slavers, and the descendants aren't around to make you feel guilty?

It is a moral thing when it functions as a vital part of the social infrastructure and functions as an aid to the lives of the slaves as opposed to a means of subjagating them.

The EAs who read and post at TT can acknowledge that claims about science refuting God's existence were the unwise utterances of overzealous atheists. By doing so they can enhance their claims that atheists rely on rational thinking as a means of determining their viewpoints.

Exactly. In The God Delusion, Dawkins makes the claim that a universe superintended by a Deity would look much different from one that isn't. This claim comes on the heels of his spending several pages making the case that God ought to be considered a scientific hypothesis like anything else. Oddly, though, Dawkins offers no hypthesis, theory or law from science to back up his claim. So not only does he not have any scientific research that remotely deals with existence of God, he goes right on to say, without the least bit of scientific justification that if the universe were superintended by God, it would look much different than the way we find it. And this is supposed to represent the high road of scientific method and reasoning.

Please step back and give me lots of room to roll on the floor laughing!!!!:roll::roll::roll::lol::lol::lol::lol:

I'm trying to see how you're saying something other than "it's too complicated, you wouldn't understand it"; Dawkins is specifically responding to a claim commonly made that it's impossible to have morality without religion; I've seen this claim made stronger by claiming that it's impossible to have morality without the Bible specifically. Are you saying that no one's made this claim? Or that this claim (no morality without the Bible) is wrong?

Your questions depend on how you define "religion" and "morality." The foundational question to this issure is: "is morality a subjective creation of an accidental process, or is it an objective law which is then discovered? "

As to, having "morality without the Bible" … you can definitely discover morality apart from belonging to a religion (since it is a natural part of us), however you wouldn't have knowledge of the spiritual origin and definition of morality from that religion's perspective.

Tell me, what is the non-religious definition of morality and deciding what is moral and why should a person be moral? When you provide me with the answer, you will discover that it involves the origin of morality. And, as the definition of morality depends on its origin, you will discover that religious morality is actually a "different animal" altogether than the non-religious view of morality; thus not even the same thing.

Furthermore, thesciphishow has already responded adequately and you refuse to acknowledge:

NO christian should directly get their morality in this fashion. It moral reasoning doesn't work like that. Nobody can ever "get their morality from the bible" in the way you suggest because you can't "get morality" at all.

You cannot teach someone right from wrong, they either understand it or they don't. Any way you would try to explain it to someone would assume they already understand the concept on some level.

Secondly, you are being extremely vague when you use the phrase "get their morality." What do you mean by this phrase?

That's an astonishing claim. Do you have an itemized list of when slavery was, historically speaking, a moral thing? Is it only when history was written by the slavers, and the descendants aren't around to make you feel guilty?

The word "slavery" used in the OT was reserved for …
1. people who sold their skills 24/7 in return for food and shelter (which is why the apostle Paul tells Christians to treat their "slaves" with respect).
2. prisoners of war … prisoners who couldn't be immediately trusted with freedom within the enemy camp.

Again: a number of empirical truth claims"“that is, those within the reach of science"“have been falsified.

Regarding God or nature? The people who wrote the Bible, did so from an ancient culture, with primitive sciences. Furthermore, no theologian that I am aware of has said that the Bible is a science textbook and I would argue explicitely with any who said otherwise. The Bible BEGINS to explain historical accounts of spiritual subjects. Every topic within the Bible is written from a vantage point of a specific person within a specific culture. We can learn from their religious views, filter what they say through what Jesus taught, and continue in our understanding of WHO God IS.

Where the Bible can be disproven (as I specified above, when making claims about things that can be tested now, but couldn't back then), it has.

And when did the Bible become a science textbook? I thought you were trying to validate the claim that science has disproved God? Or, are you saying that science has disproved certain things that the Bible says God did? If that is the case, you are completely wrong, since the Bible says that "God created." When has science ever proved that God did not create our reality?

IOW, science may have disproved false assumption about the operation of nature that Biblical writers may have had, but science has not ever disproved God's existence or that God created … [everything].

Now, if you would like to continue this discussion, I am going to need a definition of the being known as God that you seem to imply that science has disproven.

Now sure, one can step outside of science and engage in a form of atheistic apologetics, cherry-picking from science the things that happen to support the philosophy of atheism.

Are you saying that science provides things that are something other than supportive or neutral with respect to atheism? Could you provide an example or two?

So, your disagreement with Dawkins' crusade against religious indoctrination of children has what, exactly, to do with the position that science has disproven the existence of any god that's not indistinguishable from a nonexistent one?

Again: a number of empirical truth claims–that is, those within the reach of science–have been falsified. Do some PubMed searching for age of the earth, or whether or not there's a dome over our heads holding back the waters in the sky, or whether flowering plants existed before insects; on second thought, don't, because the relevant research is pretty damned old and I don't think PubMed goes back that far. Where the Bible can be disproven (as I specified above, when making claims about things that can be tested now, but couldn't back then), it has. There's also that study on the effectiveness of prayer, pointing out that if there is a god, it's not the sort that intervenes in a way distinguishable from not intervening at all.

If none of these things are religious in nature, and kicking them out from under the religious didn't undermine the structure of their beliefs, why the religious uproar over (for instance) the theory of evolution, which, according to you, doesn't have any bearing on anything religious? That undermining the literal truth of the Bible doesn't undermine Christianity?

What remains, when you take this away from religion? Untestable claims about nonmaterial realities which are outside the realm of science. Science has disproven the idea that the earth is a flat plate on the back of four elephants on the back of a turtle, but I doubt you'll be able to find a statement to that effect in the peer-reviewed research.

thesciphishow:

Oh I know how he tries to argue [that people don't get their morality from the Bible], but all he demonstrates making claims like this ( and you likewise echoing them) is show his complete ignorance of the different strains of moral thought that have gone on in different religious traditions, but especially the judeo-christian one, about natural law and ethics and how this charge is essentially a strawman.

I'm trying to see how you're saying something other than "it's too complicated, you wouldn't understand it"; Dawkins is specifically responding to a claim commonly made that it's impossible to have morality without religion; I've seen this claim made stronger by claiming that it's impossible to have morality without the Bible specifically. Are you saying that no one's made this claim? Or that this claim (no morality without the Bible) is wrong?

Could you give me a brief overview of some reasoning that shows either (a) no one really claims that you need the Bible to be moral (given the common claim that atheists just want to be able to sin, sin, sin, so they reject Christianity), or (b) you can be moral without the Bible (or without religion at all)? I'm seeing a lot of hand-waving toward imaginary subtleties (kind of like what got this thread started in the first place), but not a lot of explanation of why they matter.

I see name-calling ("mental retardation", "angry 15 year old"), but I'm not seeing anything in support of your points. Am I supposed to have some sort of mystical experience and agree with you at this point?

Looking at your following post, I think I see that you're taking claim (a), that no one is really saying that atheists can't be moral without religion of some sort, usually Biblical Christianity. Is this correct? I can point out a instances of common perception of atheists as inherently immoral because they're not instructed by Biblical law, if it is.

Slavery in the OT context and practiced in the OT way isn't immoral. Quite the opposite really. However the person in question is simply confusing chattel slavery in the US South with OT Israelite slavery. They are certianly not the same thing.

That's an astonishing claim. Do you have an itemized list of when slavery was, historically speaking, a moral thing? Is it only when history was written by the slavers, and the descendants aren't around to make you feel guilty?

You write:

Are you aware that this show of googling for scientific papers on the existence of God is silly?

Are you aware that PubMed is not Google? PubMed is a database of 17 million scientific articles. That database shows no evidence of science addressing the existence of God. Now sure, one can step outside of science and engage in a form of atheistic apologetics, cherry-picking from science the things that happen to support the philosophy of atheism. Yet this activity is not science.

Once again, Dawkins becomes the perfect archetype for the New Atheists. He expends tremendous energy and time trying to rhetorically fuse Atheism and Science. But the old guy has never published a single scientific research article that addresses his "God hypothesis." Nada. Zero. Zilch. Not one. And if that wasn't bad enough, he abandons science to peddle his pseudoscientific notion that religious parents are child abusers.