The Myth of Christian Morality

In a religious debate, one point that the religious often bring up is that without religion, we would have no morality. They maintain that religion is the source of our understanding of how to treat other people. That things like, the Ten Commandments provide us with a moral compass, without which we would be largely ignorant of right and wrong, and basically all of civilization would fall apart, cats and dogs would be sleeping together, everyone would be killing or raping or stealing from each other. In short, they maintain that religion is the moral duct tape and bubble gum that keeps our makeshift raft of humanity from exploding and generally ruining this whole metaphysical MacGyver episode.

I've given this some thought and I think that this is a fascinating position to take, because for the most part most religious persons do not, in fact, take the position that everything in their religious texts are to be taken literally or are to be used as moral teachings. For instance, most Christians would agree that the Bible has a strong stance against, for example, murdering someone. There is even a commandment against this (I'm using "murder" because this appears to be the best translation of the Hebrew word "rasah", but "kill" works equally well for my purposes here); however, they apparently choose to ignore verses of the bible that specifically direct them to murder others, such as:

If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives. (Leviticus 20:13 NAB)

Whoever strikes his father or mother shall be put to death. (Exodus 21:15 NAB)

If a man commits adultery with another man's wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death. (Leviticus 20:10 NLT)


The list of capital crimes in the Bible is huge and exhausting. God himself appears to murder a lot of people indiscriminately for almost no reason at all. Lot's wife, for instance, was murdered for literally just looking the wrong way.

This same thing holds true for other moral teachings as well. For instance, a Christian might say that the teachings of the Bible would clearly not condone rape, yet there are many stories of rape in the bible in which those who are doing the raping are considered the heroes of the story (Lot, offering his virgin daughters to the mob of men in Sodom so that the angels in his house would not be harmed, for example.) Which Christian today would offer up their virgin daughters to be raped by a mob under any circumstances?

So we come to my point: my observation is that "Christian Morality" is a myth. It is my observation that the morality that people get from the Bible is really the exact same morality that they already possessed and nothing more. That people use their own inherent understandings of morality to decide what parts of the Bible to follow and which are moral, and base their faith on those verses that support their own personal view of God, their own personal interpretation of God's teachings. In a sense, they are creating their own God whose intentions match their understanding of morality. Every Christian denomination does this to some degree. In fact, choosing which parts of the Bible to focus on is basically the defining characteristic of any given offshoot of Christianity.


Now, I am purposely limiting my opinions here to what I know best, Christians and Christianity. However, I think that it stands to reason that much of my argument may still apply to other religions. Though I do know that some fundamentalist religious groups do hold to their religious texts very rigorously and to them, perhaps, this argument does not apply. I would submit to you though, that those who do consider their religious texts as absolute moral authorities and who do try to follow these texts to the letter of the laws prescribed are extremely rare, and when extant, are considered by most outsiders to be extremely immoral, fanatical, and in many contexts, outright dangerous. So again, the concept of religion as a moral authority seems highly suspect.

To close today, I think that it seems clear that morality can be understood outside the context of religion and that, indeed, if anything, religion only muddies the waters. To me, I feel that this strengthens my resolve that morality is best understood in the context of reason and intellect, which is the path upon which I seem to find the best footing. Your mileage may vary.

On Religion

I was raised as a Christian in rural America. Growing up, we went to church on Sundays. I went to Sunday School. My Dad sang in the choir. He was an elder in the church. I went to church camp. In short, I was immersed in Christianity as a child, but something never felt exactly right about it all to me.

Even as a child, I think I realized that there was something wrong with the stories they would tell in church. As I approach 40, I don't recall the specifics of my childhood rationale, but I do recall feeling that there seemed to be a lot of glaring inconsistencies with the logic of the people I was around. "Noah did what now?" "I have to love God or he will torture me forever after I die?" "What do you mean, talking snakes?" Needless to say, I was not popular in Sunday School. However, I did take away something from those years: an innate sense of a Creator; that there was some ultimate good in the universe and that it maybe had some plan for me after my life here on Earth was over.

As I grew older, I compartmentalized this part of my mind to keep it away from what I learned in high school, college, and life. If someone would ask, I would say that absolutely I believed in God (denial of God, I remember being told many times, was the one unforgivable sin), but that I wasn't sure of the specifics surrounding His works or will and as such, didn't really feel it was my place to try to convince anyone that they were wrong or I was right. That when it came down to it, my beliefs were, I freely admitted, based on "faith" in what felt right. While all true, this was really just my defense mechanism to keep people from fiddling around too much in that compartment of my mind which I had created to store my irrational thoughts. It seemed to work well.

Lately, I've opened up that part of my mind and begun to examine its contents. This is an activity I can't recommend highly enough; everyone should do it and I wish I'd done it sooner. I've realized that I have a lot of skepticism about religion in general and admitting this has been extremely liberating. It is, as Christopher Hitchens might put it, much like refusing to submit to living in a celestial dictatorship. It is saying, "No. No I do not submit myself to your heavenly government on the basis of threats or promises of rewards. I choose to examine my life and make rational choices about what is right and wrong based on reason and intellect, not fear and greed."

I am not saying that there is no God; I simply don't know if there is or not. I will say that as I've examined my life and my thoughts on religion, I've come to realize that at some point over the years, I've stopped being motivated to do good because of heavenly threats and promises, and started being motivated to do good because of a deeper understanding of morality and ethics and a desire to act as a genuinely moral person. Furthermore, as I have looked over my own history and examined what I understood about religion up to this point, I have also noticed a great many problems reconciling the beliefs of Christianity with what reasoned thought proclaims as moral and rational behavior. In future posts here, I intend to discuss some of these issues.



"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." --Thomas Jefferson

Welcome!

Welcome, to the Reasoned Observer

Welcome to my Blog. Yes, it's a Blog. If you don't like Blogs, boy have you come to the wrong place. :)

I intend to use this medium to talk about a great many things I have observed in life and hope that it helps me continue to grow as a person. I intend to try to remain open-minded, but to examine a great many subjects here with a fair amount of honest skepticism.

For those who disagree with my observations, I welcome their input, which I will examine with as much fairness and reason as possible.