Richard Dawkins

D

droid

Guest
Yep - thats the one I always throw at religious homophobes.

@Tea - look, Im not defending the bible for a second, but there are 31,102 verses in the old and new testament. Of them, 3 (the Leviticus ones you've pointed out) explicitly condemn homosexuality. I think its fair to say thats a very small percentage, or in technical terms 'fuck all'.

Like most people, for a long time I assumed that since Christianity was so homophobic, there must be a core of condemnation running through the entire book - but there isnt. If those 3 verses of Leviticus had been lost down the back of the sofa or edited out in one of the many committee meetings there would be little or no religious basis for homophobia.

If we're aiming for rational criticism of religion I think there is at least some responsibility for the skeptic to have an accurate idea of what is being criticised.
 
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
OK, so a lot of people (all of them?) who follow religions with a canonical scripture don't adhere to the letter to everything it says in them. This is hardly controversial. The fact that people pick and choose the laws that suit them from a supposedly ineffable document is a good argument against trying to base a modern country's legal code on scripture, and one that secularists would do well to use more often, I think.
 
D

droid

Guest
Mr. Tea said:
OK, so a lot of people (all of them?) who follow religions with a canonical scripture don't adhere to the letter to everything it says in them. This is hardly controversial. The fact that people pick and choose the laws that suit them from a supposedly ineffable document is a good argument against trying to base a modern country's legal code on scripture, and one that secularists would do well to use more often, I think.
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You dont even need to go there. Basing law on scripture is insane for many reasons - that said, there are some biblical laws that do make sense (thou shalt not kill etc...).
 
D

droid

Guest
I sense we're only two moves away from a suggestion that morality stems from religion.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
droid said:
Basing law on scripture is insane for many reasons
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Sure, that's obvious to you and me, but it's not obvious to some people. What I'm saying is, it's an argument that can be used to demonstrate the inconsistency in the positions held by people who want to institute theocracy - whereas just saying "You're nuts, fuck off" is unlikely to change anyone's mind.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"It's an honest question."
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And a difficult one of course. Also the legal system is always different from any moral code (does it have to be?) so there are two questions there.
If anything scripture was based on what people at the time thought the legal system should be - killing, stealing etc are fairly uncontroversially things that no-one wants to be on the receiving end of, the stuff about not insulting God was probably stuck in cos the sky fairy was the source of the lawmakers' authority, and all the stuff about not eating pigs or whatever was presumably cos they were believed to be bad for you.
So I don't think there should be a question of "if not relgion, then what?" but rather the same question that's always been there, simply "what?".
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
vimothy said:
So what should we base our country's legal code on?
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The ineffable diktats of Supreme Leader, Brother Tea. Obviously.

Or, alternatively, some concept of common human rights and a state apparatus to safeguard those rights from abuse by other individuals, corporations or the state itself. I would say.
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
But where do they come from? They come from a tradition that you inherited that is at least as arbitrary from an individual point of view as any given religion.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
vimothy said:
But where do they come from? They come from a tradition that you inherited that is at least as arbitrary from an individual point of view as any given religion.
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I don't think so. Religions disagree on whether there are many gods, one God, or no god at all. They disagree on whether the dead go to an afterlife or get reincarnated. They disagree on whether divinity can ever be made flesh. Rules on food, clothing, sex, family life, business and so on vary enormously. But injunctions against theft and murder are pretty universal, aren't they?
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Mr. Tea said:
I don't think so. Religions disagree on whether there are many gods, one God, or no god at all. They disagree on whether the dead go to an afterlife or get reincarnated. They disagree on whether divinity can ever be made flesh. Rules on food, clothing, sex, family life, business and so on vary enormously. But injunctions against theft and murder are pretty universal, aren't they?
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Is that a non sequitur?

Some rules appear to be universal across moral codes / belief systems, and some do not. Any tradition will therefore combine the generic with the idiosyncratic. Fine, but what of it?
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
vimothy said:
Is that a non sequitur?

Some rules appear to be universal across moral codes / belief systems, and some do not. Any tradition will therefore combine the generic with the idiosyncratic. Fine, but what of it?
Click to expand...

Then a good place to start, if you're trying to construct a legal code, might be to give more weight to the very generic moral impulses ("killing people is bad") than the idiosyncratic ones ("being gay is bad").
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Why?

Remember that you were addressing my claim that all traditions are arbitrary from the point of view of the individual.

(Your two illustrations seem quite contentious, for example. What if "being gay is bad" is generic and not idiosyncratic)?
 
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