Originally Posted By: Gregg
Originally Posted By: tacit
From the Christian Bible, which endorses slavery and teaches that women are inferior to men..


That's no on the first, and, uh, no on the second. But those misconceptions are common.


There are passages in the Bible, in both the old and the new testaments, which condone slavery and explicitly say that women are inferior to men.

You can argue that these passages reflect the societies of Biblical times or that they are the responsibility of specific individuals, but that does not change the fact that they are there. The Bible contains passages endorsing both of these views, as well as other, equally reprehensible views.

Which is exactly my point--faith-based moral systems always reflect, never set, the morality of their adherents. A religion which condemns something that the people in the society where that religion believe is good, or which claims as good that which those people condemn, is unlikely to gain traction. Religious systems flourish when they cater to rather than seek to change the various prejudices and bigotries of the target audience.

Author Sam Harris argues that a religious person can function in a modern, industrial society only if he does not take the sacred texts of his religion seriously, and that the more seriously a person takes the religious texts of his faith, the less able that person is to function.

The Bible commands many reprehensible things and condones many more--it teaches, among other things, that a man may sell his daughter as a sex slave provided that he does not sell her to foreigners; that if a person in a town turns from god that everyone in that town, including infants and animals, must be killed; that if a family raises a son who turns from god, it is the responsibility of that family to put their son to death; that a woman who is not a virgin on her wedding night must be stoned to death; that if a betrothed woman is raped, she and the rapist are both to be executed; and so on.

Modern Christians find ways to rationalize not doing these things and do not obey these Biblical commands because as members of an industrial, pluralistic society, we believe these things are wrong and our society does not condone them. On a practical level, our society could not continue to function if we still obeyed these imperatives.

There are modern-day Christians who believe that all the commandments in the Bible, including those about executing women who are not virgins and putting to death both the rapist and his victim, should be obeyed. The Christian Reconstructionist movement, for example, wants to see the United States governed by an absolute theocracy which enforces all 613 commandments in the Bible which have not expressly and explicitly been revoked by the New Testament. Needless to say, these are the folks who approve of planting bombs in clinics and gay bars, and they don't make very nice neighbors.

(Interestingly, the one area which is a significant source of contention within the Reconstructionist movement is the issue of slavery. Most Christian Reconstructionists favor bringing back slavery, on the grounds that the Bible explicitly endorses it; a minority of Reconstructionists oppose this view.)

The point here is that there is an inverse correlation between being a good citizen of a modern, pluralistic society and believing in the Bible, the Koran, or other sacred religious texts; being a good citizen of a modern industrial society just about requires finding some way, if you are religious, of rationalizing the idea that the majority of the scriptures of your faith do not apply to you.


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