ForumsWEPRBiblical Morality (or Religious Morality)

57 22674
BigP08
offline
BigP08
1,455 posts
Shepherd

This may or may not turn into another classic "Theism vs Atheism" thread, and I kind of expect that but I was hoping to keep it on a very specific topic with respect to Christianity. If anyone has another religion whose morality they'd like to discuss that'd be fine too. In general, I was hoping this could focus less on the "is God real" aspect of our discussion, which seems to be the driving force in most religious threads, and specifically on the "if this religion's god is real, is he/it moral?"
The topic is pretty general, but I'll try to start us off with some basic scenarios.
As many of us atheists may be ready to present, there are a lot of passages in the Bible about slavery (click here for specifics). I was wondering how this can be justified if these stories are part of the religion. The passages get pretty specific about how you can beat your slaves as long as they don't die and how they are your property. I find this immoral.
The second one that comes to mind is human sacrifice. Off the top of my head three stories come to mind. The first one, Abraham and Isaac, isn't really human sacrifice as God tells Abraham "just kidding" at the last second. Still, I find it odd that he is revered for his willingness to kill his own son in deference to his god. The second one, is the story of Jeptathah sacrificing his daughter to God since God let him win the battle, details here. We're talking about a God that let Jeptathah win the battle in exchange for Jeptathah sacrificing the first thing that came out of his house, and when it was his daughter, God should've come down and said "Hey, don't kill her, we're even. I don't accept human sacrifice." But he didn't. The third example I have is the most obvious one, Jesus Christ (no link necessary). God accepted the sacrifice of Jesus for repentence for our sins, who is supposedly (maybe not in all religions) considered fully human and fully divine. If this is the case, God accepted the sacrifice of someone fully human instead of just forgiving us without a sacrifice.
The last thing I want to mention is the idea of Hell. Eternal punishment for finite crime is immoral, in my opinion. If you believe God sends anybody to Hell, then he is immoral. Even Hitler doesn't deserve to be tortured forever because he would have to commit an infinite amount of crimes.

You by no means have to talk about every issue and add any issue you want to (even if Christians know an issue in their religion and want to bring it up to counter it, that's welcome). Final point, if the mods think this thread is too similar to another thread or just think this discussion should continue in the main one, I understand. But I was hoping the specific point of this thread could be morality of religions (I started off with the one I know best, my former one) and not whether or not to believe they are true.

  • 57 Replies
Showing 61-60 of 57