Thursday, November 30, 2017

THE BIBLE AS A BASIS FOR MORAL GUIDANCE

Recently I had a conversation with the pastor of a local mainstream Protestant church.  At one point in our discussion he asked me if I considered the Bible to be a sufficient source for moral guidance.  His question caught me off guard, and I think I mumbled something about there being sources other than the Bible that can provide moral and ethical guidance.

Since that discussion I have had time to think further about the pastor’s question.  My conclusion is that the Bible is an extremely poor source for moral guidance.

To understand my point of view, take a fresh look at the Bible.  It really is a massive text, containing approximately 800,000 words, about the same as ten average-length novels.  And frankly it seems longer than that.  But precious little of the Bible is actually devoted to moral discourse or guidance.

First, the Old Testament.  The first five books, the Pentateuch, describe the early “history” of the Hebrew people.  I put “history” in quotes because much of the narrative consists of myths, nearly all of which are wholly inconsistent with scientific and archaeological findings.  In terms of moral guidance, it is true that the book of Exodus contains the ten commandments, but they are woefully deficient as the basis for a moral code.  This, despite the fact that many evangelicals promote the ten commandments as fundamental to the foundations and fabric of American culture.  They aren’t.

It is also true that the Pentateuch contains a great number of other rules of conduct.  Some of those rules may be consistent with contemporary moral standards, but many others are shockingly barbaric and totally contrary to modern moral and ethical thought.  Some are so embarrassingly far removed from modern standards that no one talks about them.  Just a couple of examples:

Exodus 21:20-21:

20 When a slaveowner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. 21 But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property.

So, not only is it OK to own slaves, it’s also OK to beat them to death so long as they live a day or two before dying.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21:

18 If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, 19 then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. 20 They shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” 21 Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death.

If a son is disrespectful, stubborn, and rebellious and if he might be a glutton and a drunkard, perhaps punishment is appropriate.  But public execution?  Really?

The problem is not that none of the rules of conduct is reasonable.  Rather, it is that the only way to sort through the rules—to distinguish the ones that could be retained from the ones that should be discarded or reviled—requires recourse to modern moral and ethical analysis.

Then there’s the Sodom and Gomorrah story.  We all were taught that story, except most of us didn’t learn the whole story.  It starts with God actually haggling with Abraham over whether or not the two towns should be destroyed and their inhabitants murdered by God because they are so full of wickedness.  Once God and Abraham have struck a bargain, God sends a couple of angels to warn Abraham’s nephew Lot to get out of town with his family.  But the townsmen confront Lot, demanding to have sex with the strangers.  Lot offers the men his two virgin daughters instead.  Whoops.  Eventually the two angels help Lot, his wife, and his daughters to escape before God calls down fire on the towns.  During their escape Lot’s wife wistfully looks back at Sodom and Gomorrah, and God turns her into a pillar of salt.  Later, both of Lot’s daughters sleep with him so that they can carry on the family line.  Please explain the moral lesson to be learned here.

A big chunk of the Old Testament following the first several books consists of histories of the Jewish people settling in Canaan and setting up their own kingdom.  Many if not most of the accounts included in these “histories” are also mythical (Samson and Delilah come to mind), but others—the succession of kings, for example—are corroborated by independent sources.  But even though these histories have some basis in fact, they offer little moral guidance beyond the idea that individuals—and tribes—should obey whatever God demands, irrespective of whether or not such actions have a grounding in moral principles.  Indeed, in several instances the action that God commanded was that the Hebrews eliminate their rivals through massive acts of genocide.  Again, what is the moral lesson to be learned?

Another large portion of the Old Testament is devoted to prophecies.  These generally stem from the time that the Hebrew kingdoms were conquered by the Babylonians, who also destroyed the Hebrews’ beloved temple in the process.  The Hebrew people were forced into exile and the prophets wrote of how and when they might be able to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple.  These prophecies were and are important to Jewish history and culture, but their relevance to contemporary moral principles is, shall we say, obscure.  Even so, all of the prophets in the Jewish scriptural canon were included when the Christian Bible was cobbled together.  But who can recall looking to passages in, say, Obadiah or Nahum or Haggai or Malachi for moral guidance?

I have skipped over a couple of other portions of the Old Testament—books of poetry (Psalms and Song of Songs) and books of wisdom (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job).   Psalms consists primarily of songs of praise for God, whereas Song of Songs is fundamentally a lengthy erotic love poem.  That leaves what I call the books of wisdom, my favorite portions of scripture.  And some of these writings are good, providing comforting—but not necessarily Christian—advice.  For example:

Ecclesiastes 8:15 and 9:5-7:

15 So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun. . . . 

5 The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. 6 Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun. 7 Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do.

Then there’s the New Testament.  These writings (other than the bizarre hallucinatory apocalyptic nightmare of Revelation), were added by 1st and 2nd century Christians and cover the lives of Jesus and his followers.  These are followed by a number of missives in which Paul, primarily, lays out the Christian argument of Jesus as God incarnate and his death and resurrection as somehow enabling humans to qualify for salvation and eternal life.  Ah, say Christians, this is where we should focus our search for moral guidance.  They point to Jesus’s version of the golden rule.  But that sentiment has existed in virtually all viable cultures, many of which predate Christianity.  Indeed, it is likely that some version of the golden rule predates any sort of organized religion.  And, by the way, the golden rule is independent of any belief in a deity.

In sum, the Bible is a very poor source for moral guidance.  It is a huge compilation of disparate writings by dozens of iron age men who had little understanding of the foundations underlying moral principles or else did not have the ability to articulate those foundations.  As a result, the Bible contains conflicting rules of conduct, many of which are contrary to what we now consider to be fundamental to the moral order.

It is not that the Bible is devoid of rules of moral conduct relevant to contemporary society.  Rather, it is that those are buried among a great number of other rules that are either irrelevant or contrary to contemporary moral sensibilities.  And the only way we can distinguish among those rules is by viewing them through the lens of contemporary standards.  It is not enough just to lay out a multitude of rules of conduct.  Those rules need to be explained and understood in the context of the meaning of morality.  The Bible fails to do that.

© 2017 John M. Phillips

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