A week ago I criticized Rabbi Eric Yoffie for claiming that he gets his morality from religion, noting that the “morality” adumbrated in the sacred book of his faith, the Old Testament, is horrendous, condoning all sorts of acts that modern folks find immoral and repugnant.
Rabbi Yoffie has responded to me, agreeing that the morality given in the Bible was wrong, and noting that after due consideration, much pilpul, and lengthy weighing of subtle nuances, scholarly Jews have decided that God didn’t mean what he said in the Old Testament:
“Jerry Coyne’s response is not serious. His position: if you take the Bible seriously, that means accepting stoning and genocide. But as I wrote, my moral decisions derive from studying and considering a 2500-year conversation among Jews and between Jews and sacred texts–one that involves not only considering the Bible but the Talmud, the responsa and rabbinic literature in all of its richness. This is a literature that rejects stoning and genocide. It is also a literature that does not always arrive at a single conclusion; nontheless, by immersing myself in that literature and in a long tradition of thoughtful religious discussions, I am able to benefit from profound insignts and make moral judgments that I find far more compelling than those that derive from secular systems.”
I would argue that these revised moral judgments are in fact not based on religion, but on secular morality. What the learned rabbis have done is simply realize that, by all human lights and standards, the stoning of nonvirgin brides, genocide, and murder of homosexuals is wrong. But the Bible nevertheless says they’re okay! The Old Testament, obviously, does not comport with our innate views of right and wrong—a secular morality that takes precedence over the pronouncements of God. Just because these moral judgments are made by a bunch of rabbis and religious Jews does not make them religious.
Similarly, if a Catholic layperson decides that using condoms or having extramarital sex don’t really constitute mortal sins, that doesn’t make those decisions “religious.”
Oh I see, so when god said “kill them all” he meant “give them all a stern talking to”, that’s obvious now that I think about it. Silly me. I guess god’s not like Horton who “said what I meant and I meant what I said”, but more like the Caterpillar whose words mean exactly what he wants them to mean! Most enlightening. Well with that attitude anything can mean anything and all language completely breaks down. We can all define black as white and get ourselves killed at the next zebra crossing as Douglas Adams foretold.
I think you meant Humpty Dumpty:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”
And Humpty Dumpty is much maligned:
The lesson here is that there is no problem provided you define the words you use. The problem is in either not defining the words, switching between meanings, or having someone else arguing against you based on a different definition.
That is the point about ‘which is to be master”
Yes you’re right I did indeed!
The thing is that if we don’t have agreed definitions then communication breaks down, you can’t just make words mean whatever you want without let or hindrance. But I agree that definitions are crucial.
Exactly.
It is the same for anyone who claims that “the bible” is the source of their morality, but who rejects even a tiny bit of this biblical morality. (And everyone does reject at least a part of it, guaranteed. Even the most devout and pious.)
For as soon as they reject an element of it, tiny as it might be, they admit that that by that very decision, that bit of morality could not possibly have come from their bible!
That single notion is the gentle zephyr that demolishes their juvenile house-of-cards entirely.
“as soon as they reject an element of it, tiny as it might be, they admit that that by that very decision, that bit of morality could not possibly have come from their bible!”
…which thereby makes their morality secular!
I had not felt the need to illuminate that (to me) rather obvious corollary, but I thank you for it anyway, as it may assist the religious readers, who have been trained to avoid such conclusions.
Well – semi-secular. It’s rooted in a religious tradition, after all, it’s just one that suspends the scripture when secular reasons dictate.
Mind, I think we have to read “secular reasons” as “whatever the interpreter thinks is important and can slide”. Maybe the worst of it is that, when it’s going under the disguise of an interpretation of divine messages, the demands of evidence and logic of open secular ethical discourse get dodged.
“my moral decisions derive from studying and considerin¬g a 2500-year conversation among Jews and between Jews and sacred texts–one that involves not only considering the Bible but the Talmud, the responsa and rabbinic literature in all of its richness. This is a literature that rejects stoning and genocide.”
So Rabbi, by your own admission, you have done away with the need for God, by claiming that you and others in your clique know better than your God/Him/Her/It?
Rabbi, It’s time to own up and admit God was made up in the first place to keep the sheeples in place!
In an age before scientific knowledge of what caused storms, volcanoes, tsunamis and most important, the germ theory of diease, your ‘leaders’ invented a wrathful god who was permanently displeased, with what you ate, how you dressed and was displeased with his creation of the foreskin!
Anyone with an ounce of intelligence knows what a good little earner you all have, ‘explaining’ the meaning of life.
Get a proper job Rabbi. You can still be kind and caring without your god to hide behind.
“So Rabbi, by your own admission, you have done away with the need for God, by claiming that you and others in your clique know better than your God/Him/Her/It?”
..and that, therefore, your morality is secular!
What I don’t get is their idea “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Some claim this does not mean god has a body but frankly they have to squirm to get out of that.
Presumably the ‘t’ in rabbi is silent.
Hehe, next time you get in a debate about humans have been “made in his image”, ask them if gods DNA is 98% the same as chimpanzees too? Just be sure to duck.
Duck?
And what percentage of our DNA might be shared with Anatidae?
Very good!
Morality is not defined by a system or culture, morality is innate within us.
However, systems of justice are defined by cultures, and this is what we’re really talking about when it comes to religion.
Justice and morality are not the same thing.
I strongly dispute your initial assertion. (That morality is ‘innate’).
It is soundly disproven by the radically different concepts of morality amongst various “primitive”1 tribes.
One only need compare the New Guinea Highlander’s concept of the strict moral necessity for murder & cannibalism, versus their very near neighbours, the Australian aborigines abhorrence for such practises to put a lie to that notion.
________________
1 Intended in its technical sense.
I really hope you’re not seriously disputing the basic emotion of empathy or compassion.
Was I really that unclear with my:
“I strongly dispute your initial assertion. (That morality is ‘innate’)”?
I have, (or had), no concept as to how this clearly parenthesised phraseology might have been mis-interpreted.
Seriously.
But I am keen to learn.
Your “I really hope you’re not seriously disputing the basic emotion of empathy or compassion” came as a bolt from the blue, as it were. Not only a response that I least expected, but one that strikes me as quite bizarre!
I do not not know whence you drew it.
What we must resolve post-haste is: who is grasping the wrong end of the stick here?
If it should be I, then so be it.
Please elucidate and educate.
Post Scriptum:
Your appear to be conflating Morality with “empathy” & “compassion”.
Is this the case?
It is my opinion, that morality originates from feelings of sympathy. Of course, it’s much more than only a feeling, because humans develop from silly random-moving babies to sophisticated adults.
I also differentiate between morality and justice. What most people talk about when talking about morality is instead justice.
Hence the disagreements, confusions, contradictions that abound whenever the subject of morality comes up.
Clearly, if you disagree with me, then you will disagree with me, and that is that. But I do think you will agree that our emotions are innate, and therefore my views clearly have some basis and might even strike some as obviously true. Yes, it is more than just that emotion, and that comes down to experience and development.
I would suggest that you have it exactly backwards.
Morality is, in the sense used by game theory, the most effective strategy for success. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is more effective in countless ways than “You scratch my back or I’ll pound you into a bloody pulp,” so evolution has provided us with senses like empathy to compute moral calculus faster and more reliably.
Our innate senses of morality are no more perfect than our eyes, however, and it behooves us to supplement them with logical analysis of observation supported by any and all tools we can muster.
Viewed from this perspective, your proposition is as hopelessly naïve as an astronomer pooh-poohing the notion that we need telescopes to understand the heavens.
Cheers,
b&
@Ben Goren
Ironically, you have it backwards.
Ignoring emotions in the making of moral judgements would indeed be like trying to do astronomy without a telescope.
And where did I suggest we ignore emotions, any more than I suggest that astronomers close their eyes? Indeed, I wrote that “evolution has provided us with senses like empathy to compute moral calculus faster and more reliably.”
How you get from such an expression to thinking that I’m recommending we ignore emotions is utterly beyond me.
My point is not that we should ignore emotions, but rather that we should supplement our imperfect emotions the exact same way we already supplement our other less-than-perfect senses. Is that really such a radical suggestion?
Cheers,
b&
“… my moral decisions derive from studying … sacred texts–one that involves not only considering the Bible but the Talmud…”
I fail to see how that makes his claim any stronger. Quite the reverse. The Talmud expands on the Torah in quite stomach-churning callous detail. For example the pure evil exhortation in Deuteronomy 22:25-29 (the one that makes rape victims marry their attacker) devolves into an orgy of horror where the learned and noble tradition of Rabbis decide how to deal with all the many forms of rape of children and women and how it is to be compensated.
You’ll be interested to learn that these holy men of God feel that participating in gang rape is not nearly as serious as being a lone rapist, and the penalty (a few coins) was significantly less if the rapist was number 7 rather than number 1. They also felt that raping a small male baby was likewise a small and not particularly terrible crime. Oh, and of course, Rabbis were exempt from being forced to marry their rape victim, because they had to marry virgins; and the woman they had just raped was hardly a virgin any more, now was she.
It goes on at length in this vein. Definitely brims with morality, doesn’t it?
Please could you give me the references for your comments on the Talmudic text. I’m not questioning your veracity, but I would like to read them in detail.
Albiet not the Talmud, I have studied the BIBLE and agree it is a piece of fiction conjured up by a bunch of tellers of violent tales, liberally dosed with pornography. I think these guys recieved a vicarious thrill from the violence and an orgasim when retelling the story of the Sodomites re the angels and Lot’s daughters in the incest scene later, etc. So the good Rabbi is correct, it really didn’t happen but how can he put it in some context to derive good from it. You are right, he derived the GOOD intuitively because HE THINKS GOOD THOUGHTS.
When approaching this topic with Christians, I like to ask: Has Jesus read the King James Bible?
Not, of course, “Did Jesus read the King James Bible during his sojourn to Judea in the first third of the first century?” for such would be patently absurd.
But, rather, “The Jesus in Heaven who is seated at the right hand of the Father and whose duty it is to judge the living and the dead: has that Jesus read the King James Bible?”
And, clearly, the only religiously-acceptable answer must be, “yes.”
And it is within those pages that one will find not only the laws about rape already referenced above but also Jesus himself being directly quoted as saying that he came to uphold those laws and that they are as eternal and unchanging as Heaven and Earth.
As a result, even the most liberal of Christians is faced with a dilemma. Clearly, Jesus has no problem with vast swaths of humanity believing that the KJV is as important and eternal as Jesus said the Mosaic law is — after all, one would suppose that it’d be trivial for Jesus to set the record straight. So, either he’s going to condemn to eternal hellfire the unsophisticated masses who failed to get the metaphors or he really meant what the plain and unequivocal language says.
Obviously Rabbi Yoffie doesn’t have a Jesus problem, but his Torah problem is much the same. If we are to accept even the simplest proposition, then it must be true that there is some element of divine influence in the Torah; otherwise, it’s just another anthology of ancient superstitious myth. But what can that divine influence possibly be?
Is the Rabbi’s God really so much of a malicious trickster that it would permit these horrid commandments be written in its name? And what of the deception inherent in the various Genesis narratives, especially the Creation and the Flood — how could any knowledgeable being of compassion and even the slightest bit of knowledge permit such nonsense to hinder the course of human advancement for so many generations? Even to this day, millennia later, we have to fight to keep it out of our science classes — and the harm from the disinformation is quite palpable.
Whether the Rabbi’s morality comes from religious or secular sources, there can be only one possible conclusion: either its origins are entirely human, or the divine is seriously fucked up.
Cheers,
b&
One may as well ask:
Has Sherlock Holmes read Harry Potter?
The parallels are profound, didactic, and equally pointless in terms of any connection to adult reality.
Soitanly…but, sadly, billions of people are convinced that Jesus in Heaven is every bit as real as Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in Buckingham Palace. I’m sure Liz has read the Magna Carta, so it hardly seems unreasonable to ask Christians if Jesus has read the Bible.
That it “just happens” to be a logic bomb is, of course, entirely intentional….
Cheers,
b&
Yes.
It never ceases to astound me just how truly stunningly and truculently puerilely pig-ignorant many religious people choose to be.
Their brains are entirely dormant oligophrenic organs, it seems.
“if a Catholic layperson decides that using condoms… don’t really constitute mortal sins, that doesn’t make those decisions “religious.””
What if they prayed about it first? Would that make them Protestant? The Bible itself is mum on condoms.
Herodotus has a great story about morality and custom:
“When Darius was king, he summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them for what price they would eat their fathers’ dead bodies. They answered that they wouldn’t do it for any amount of money. Then Darius summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding through interpreters what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrible an act.”
Quod erat demonstrandum re my above post concerning intrinsic morality.
I thank you M31.
(Are you a British motorway?)
M31 is the Andromeda galaxy. It will be really exciting in a few billion years if there is a “collision” between our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy.
So, you think that I am replying to a post by a galaxy? ;D
That would, at the very least, render it female (galactos), and by the Rabbi’s biblical definition, make it half as massive as mere science describes.
So, they won’t collide at all, as your puny mortal arithmetic is rendered mute in comparison to such astounding (non-conjurer’s) miracles as:
* A BURNING BUSH!
* A torpid serpent being roused!
* A human telling others that he had found some stone tablets somewhere while they weren’t looking!
No, the Rabbi has faith on his side.
This is another perfect example of how god can’t lose. God gives these people divine revelations about morality and justice that are clearly immoral and unjust, so Jewish intellectuals spend thousands of years fixing the immoral edicts to produce an actually moral moral code, and god gets the credit. Given millennia one could easily turn the morality found in Mein Kampf into the Humanist Manifesto.
Considering that Mein Kampf is nothing more than “sophisticated” Christian apologetics indistinguishable from those penned by no less a personage than Martin Luther himself, there’s both more and less to your theory than many suppose.
Still, it would take much less than a millennium to achieve the same end without starting with a dead albatross surgically attached to your neck.
Cheers,
b&
No wonder Mister Hilter from Minehead (already) wanted 1000 years to pay his rent.
He’s a bit irritable, mind you. He hasn’t slept since 1945.
And that nice Mister McGoering from the Bell and Compasses knows where to hire bombers by the hour.
I know. How could anybody possibly expect such a thing?
b&
Reading a baby book recently, it discussed the history of childbirth. It had this story, and t’s a good example of how backwards religious morality can be.
Chloroform was introduced as a pain killer around the 1860’s. Up to that point, women had no choice other than suffer the pain of childbirth. Some doctors used chloroform to help women through labor. Other doctors were cautious and warned there might be unknown effect on mother or baby–a reasonable concern for a new advancement. But the clergy threw a fit, claiming blaspheme. Labor pains were a woman’s punishment for Eve’s original sin. How dare doctors interfere with gods will.
If Yoffie is smart, at this point he’ll mention a “No True Scotsman” fallacy and consider himself to’ve won the point.
So true, and so hard to get across. People who regard their religion as central to their lives naturally assume that it informs their every thought. Simply looking at the moral judgments of our ancestors, which they thought were informed by religion, should correct this misconception, but no.
If the holy book says X and we agree that X is right, then we conclude that X is right. If the holy book says X and we disagree that X is right, then we conclude that X is wrong.
What actual work is “the holy book says” doing in such a case?
Ben Goren,
Well put.
I often point out essentially the same issue to Christians – how absurd it is for a Rational or Benevolent God to allow such religious confusion, especially given the results of religious conflict, or mistaken biblical beliefs, can be the cause of conflict, suffering and death.
This brings to mind William L. Craig’s moves used in his debates. I believe it was in Craig’s debate with Victor Stenger that Craig in an earlier portion described the Bible as “God’s love-letter to humanity, that we may know of God’s character.” (Paraphrased).
Yet later when the issue of immoral commands in the Bible arose, Craig did his usual shuffling of shells: “Oh, but that gets to the issue of Biblical Infallibility/biblical literalism, and this debate is not concerned with that topic.” (Craig uses that rhetoric all the time to doge issues that are hard for him to smooth over in a public debate).
But the obvious problem is: If the bible is as Craig claims God’s letter to humanity so we can know God’s character and will, what possible sense could it make that it would get information wrong about God, or allow the strong impression that God did or commanded immoral acts? Why would it be so egregiously wrong or confusing on serious matters of God’s character?
What kind of rational Being “communicates” like that?
If you are a good person writing a letter, do you just mistakenly slip in inaccurate portions that portray you as a serial killer?
Even if you are dictating a letter, would you KNOWINGLY allow your secretary to insert
descriptions of you as a mass murderer, and then let that version of your “message” become disseminated?
That’s madness.
Christians on one hand want to say God was somehow involved in the Biblical Revelation of Himself, yet on the other when convenient say “Oh, but this part may not be accurate on it’s face.”
And they wonder why we don’t take them seriously.
Vaal.
As an atheist I have a firm principle to not tell anyone else what their religion is. If Rabbi Yoffe says that some specific moral judgements are part of his religion I think it is improper for a non jew, let alone an atheist, to tell him that they aren’t. Claiming that he is wrong about his religion because something in the Bible contradicts him is requiring him to take a literalist position on Biblical interpretation which I personally (and I think almost all atheists) would not advocate.
Well it depends.
No modern Christian or Jew “owns” the bible.
It’s an ancient document and we are all free to make a judgement as to whether to take it’s claims seriously, in any way, on any level.
A Christian or Jew is someone who has taken certain claims in the Bible seriously. (Well, at least those Jews who are not in effect atheists).
But a Jew no more has the final word on how one ought to interpret the Bible as a Mormon has the final word on how to interpret the Book Of Mormon. So long as a Mormon says “This part really happened” it’s entirely rational of an atheist to say “Actually, no, that’s completely ridiculous to believe that.”
Same with any Jewish claim of the divine origin of any part of the Bible.
The point Jerry Coyne is making, that many of us would fully support, is simply that, like so many Christians, some Jewish claims about what the bible “actually says” seem to be complete rubbish. It may be what they believe…but their interpretation is as poorly reasoned and rationally unjustified as any Christian, be the liberal or fundamentalist/literalist.
It’s not telling someone what they believe, or what their religion is when you point out that when you look at the bible, and then look at the Rabbi’s claims of what it “really” says, that the Rabbi’s interpretation seems clearly desperate and unjustified.
If someone were re-interpreting the Harry Potter series as pointing to some actual truth of the magical realm within, I don’t care if they say “It’s my religion.” It makes perfect sense to reply: “Whatever label you give your behaviour, your approach to that text is silly. It’s clearly fiction and the interpretations you are using to justify a belief in some of it’s story seem quite poorly justified.”
Vaal.
Let me make this simple for you.
What you call the “Bible” is just one small piece of an entire package. To use your example it’s like telling JK Rowling that Harry Potter is really only the first book. Nonsense.
The “package” includes the 5 books of Moses, the Prophets, the Writings (eg Ruth, Esther, etc.) and the Talmmud.
You’re free to interpret the “bible” however you want, but to say that the bible doesn’t belong to Judaism would be as absurd as to say that Harry Potter doesn’t “belong” to Ms. Rowling. And your personal interpretation of the Bible is as “valid” as your personal interpretation of HP.
Neither the Hebrew nor the Greek scriptures “belong” to anyone. Different religions utilize them for their own ends.
Potter belongs to Rowling because she’s the author. Duh.
Vaal’s reply discusses a lot of hypothetical claims that the Rabbi might hold, but that weren’t in the quote that Jerry Coyne provided. My comment was based entirely on that quote. In particular it’s very clear from that quote that his views are based on a lot more than a literal reading of the Bible.
And if the Rabbi says that his religion rejects stoning and genocide, I don’t have any reason to doubt him.
If someone (certainly not I) wants to defend stoning and genocide as moral then they are entitled to do so.
And if someone caught the Rabbi participating in (or justifying) stoning or genocide they are entitled to say that he really doesn’t find those practices immoral.
And if the Rabbi says there is a God, (which wasn’t in the above quote) I will dispute that.
What I will not do is tell him what morality his religion requires. Especially I will not cite the Bible because as an atheist I take it as a ancient work of literature with no special authority.
You are correct in that no one can tell someone else “what their religion is”. Religion being pretty much fact-free, it can be whatever anyone wants.
However, if someone claims that their ideas (‘religious’ or otherwise) follow from some set of principles or some text, then reason and facts do come into play, and one can quite reasonably point out that, while person X claims that his religion is based on some text or principles X, such a claim is false, in that the text says A while his religious claim is ~A.
A Jew (or Christian, or Muslim) is free to define his personal religion in any way he chooses, but if his principles conflict with those stated in the holy book, then he cannot rightly claim that they derive from it.
Further, this seems to be a perfect instance of the “religious morality two-step”. That is, God’s law is eternal an unchanging as written in the holy book. Except for the parts that are, in our eyes, wrong, which are different. But God’s law is eternal and unchanging.
As I noted above, once one begins to pick and choose based upon human reason, the “divinely inspired” holy book becomes irrelevant.
What Yoffe actually claimed is that his moral judgements are based on “studying and considering a 2500-year conversation among Jews and between Jews and sacred texts–one that involves not only considering the Bible but the Talmud, the responsa and rabbinic literature in all of its richness”
Unless you’re familiar with all those things (and I’m not familiar with any of them) then you can’t say that his views aren’t based on them. In particular just pointing out that the Bible says something is inadequate.
You misunderstand the point, I think. Yes, his views are the result of a “2500-year conversation” among scholars. I wouldn’t disagree. But his views plainly are not based upon his holy book, for they plainly conflict with some of what is written in that holy book. His views are a purely human construction based on a purely human “conversation”, and not on any divine revelation. There is nothing wrong with that, , in and of itself (it could hardly be otherwise, after all); the problem is in attempting to claim some special (divine?) status for his humanly-based views.
“It’s God’s law… except when we humans decide otherwise” just isn’t a tenable position.
In fact, it is a crystal clear admission that human morality trumps that of any putative ‘god’.
If he can admit that for even just one case, then why bother with the pretence?
I’ll tell you why. The Rabbi would be forced to find some gainful employment, and abandon his vile parasitic life-style.
As I recall God instructed the Jews to eliminate the Amorites, Jebusites etc because they did detestable things (see Leviticus 18) and would cause the Jews to worship false gods and do similar detestable things.
Similarly executions are never pleasant however they may be necessary. Stoning at at least placed the responsibility for the accused death on the community rather than an individual. It also symbolically demonstrated that the accused conduct was condemned by the entire society.
I detest people who justify Biblical genocides, like you do, as “necessary.” And your sanction of stoning is simply barbaric and evil. I suggest you find some other Christian website that agrees with your twisted views.
I had hoped that an evolutionist would be interested in the survival strategies of both groups and individuals.
In some sense the Jews and the Canaanites present a control study for anthropologists.
Why are there no identifiable Canaanites or Canaanite institutions in New York for example but Jewish ones abound.
Attempted rationalization of the loathsome, evil, and utterly cruel actions described in the bible is not a sign of mental health on your part.
And as so many ignorant theists do, you conflate evolution and atheism.
If you wish to be taken seriously, make intelligent comments.
What a truly evil abomination you are.
I can only hope that you are isolated from society, forcibly if need be, before you start murdering your neighbors for the heinous crime of cleaning the yard on Saturday. Numbers 15:32-36.
b&
Which is evil a social order which results in your offspring being alive and thriving despite adversity three thousand years later or having social arrangements which result in your extinction ?
The bible enjoins genocide and stoning. These are evil, pure and simple.
Thank you Jerry Schwarz! You’re the first rational atheist I’ve seen here.
It is astounding to me how “religious” these atheists can be about their atheism. In realty they’ve just substituted one ism for another.
Jerry Coyne stated above:
“The Old Testament, obviously, does not comport with our innate views of right and wrong—a secular morality that takes precedence over the pronouncements of God. Just because these moral judgments are made by a bunch of rabbis and religious Jews does not make them religious.”
Classic straw man. He has re-created Judaism in his own image and then proceeds to determine that HIS religioun is not religious.
Whether you like it or not what you people call “secular morality” is built into Judaism. Oh believe many religious Jews would not like it to be called that but that’s what it is. But to say that our system is not “religious” is to deny our ability to have a religion. You don’t agree with it, fine. But, telling us that our religion is not religious enough for you? Just a tad ironic coming from an atheist, don’t you think?
You (and Jerry Schwarz) are missing the point so well it’s almost like you’re doing it on purpose.
No-one here thinks that Christian or Jews ‘ought to’ take their holy texts literally or try to base their lives on a literal take of those texts. Quite the reverse, we’re both pleased and relieved you don’t.
What we are taking issue with is your insistence that your morality comes from those texts when it so clearly does not.
You can talk all you like about how you interpret your texts metaphorically – as if there was anything metaphorical in the exhortations of Deuteronomy 22:25-29 that I mentioned above, let alone the subsequent learned discussions of that passage in the Talmud. They certainly weren’t metaphorical for centuries.
You no doubt dismiss these laws as a product their time to be viewed only in the context of history.
Excellent. I couldn’t agree more.
But trying to convince me that your choice to treat those former laws as a bit of redundant cultural history is because of your religious tradition is futile. It is the result of centuries of enlightenment and culture and society becoming secular and moving away from old parochial laws that are inequitable and immoral.
What is more probable in the case of modern, moderate Jews & Christians is a lot of moral choices are informed by factors external to religion and are then reverse-engineered to try and fit some of the texts.
Oh, and a little note on the atheists here: not all but a great many of us are former Jews and former Christians. In other words, we are as familiar with religion as you are. We just don’t believe any of it is true any more.
I’m not trying to convince you of anything. The only reason I comment here is because not everyone who comments here is quite as enlightened as you are in understanding the development of religion.
Feel free to not believe, that’s your choice. As long you remain a decent, moral, and ethical person you don’t bother me a twit. And I’ll feel free to believe and you should have no problem with me as long as I do the same.
What I find fascinating though, is the rabid proselytization of many of the atheists here. They put the most evangelical Christians to shame!
Could you point out some of this rabid prozletyzing (sp?) – I see legitimate concerns about the fundamental irrationality and inconsistency of theists, but no attempts to persuade theists of the superior virtues of atheism.
I don’t know exactly from where my own sense of morality comes. I’m sure I acquired some of it from my parents and other people with whom I was in frequent and close contact as I grew up. I note, however, that some parts of it are consistent with sections of Talmud.
You completely misread the post, I think.
Agreed.
Jerry and Yoni seem to completely miss the point on this issue.
It’s not that we are telling someone “what they believe.”
It’s a matter of pointing out contradictions, or poor reasoning, even within their religious beliefs.
If someone adopts Mein Kampf as the text for his “religion” I’m not going to tell him what he believes.
But if it’s this person’s “interpretation” of Mein Kampf that Hitler was actually a friend of the Jews, then I am quite justified in pointing out that drawing such an inference from the text is ludicrous – the text directly contradicts it.
And that therefore such an inference does not “come from the text” but from some outside motivation to make it say what the person wants it to say.
This is essentially what Jerry, and others, are pointing out about the Rabbi’s rant.
They may say that the motivation for evolving
moral norms have come from their religious text, but it’s clear that this isn’t the case given how the text contradicts this claim. Hence the change must be more likely coming from a “secular” – that is a worldly, human, not divine – source of human conversation and philosophy.
Vaal.
Whoops, in case it wasn’t clear:
My first use of “Jerry” denotes Jerry Schwarz.
My second denotes Jerry Coyne.
Vaal
“. . . profound insights(corrected spelling). . . “.
Surely not the rabbai’s own!
And if scwarz is the first “rational atheist” yoni has seen post on weit, it simply means that yoni hasn’t bothered to read many of the posts.
Maybe, or maybe it’s just the irrational ones that stick out…
“Just because these moral judgments are made by a bunch of rabbis and religious Jews does not make them religious.”
By this argument what moral judgments could be deemed “religious”? This argument seems like equivocation at best.
I posted the following reply to eyoffie’s comment:
It seems you and Jerry Coyne are agreeing that humans have an innate capacity for moral judgement. If this were not so the 2500 year process of conversation that involves effectively amending the Bible with the Talmud would not be possible. Mere humans, even Rabbis, could not improve on the morality of the bible if humans did not have an excellent moral capacity. I think you both can also agree that the Bible is not a work of moral perfection. I think what Mr. Coyne adds to this is simply that there was a process lasting much longer than 2500 years, the evolution of the human brain and human social structures, that conferred this moral capacity upon human beings.