Does Morality Come From the Bible?

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks to Andrew Atkinson on MySpace for this.

Glenn Kachmar said...

John, this video is fantastic. It eviscerates the naïve view that the bible is the source of morals (as you obviously know). Of course the behaviour of christians nicely takes care of this idea as well, but the video is more to the point.

I posted this video on my blog as well. I hope that's OK. Do send me a cease and desist email if it isn't.

Anonymous said...

Hi John,
You might be interested in Calvin on Science at He Lives.

Anonymous said...

Glenn, anything I post here you may use. Besides, I didn't make the video.

Thanks Jennifer, I'll take a look see.

Cheers.

Anonymous said...

That was the wrong link. The discussion I was referring to was this one, Is That All There Is?. If you already looked you must have been scratching your head.

Glenn Kachmar said...

Thanks, John.

By the way, I am a faithful reader even if I don't comment on very many posts.

Brian_E said...

Jennifer,

How does that link even begin to remotely answer this question? The commenters over there are even taking apart that argument. His basic argument is that morality comes from god, and that's about it.

So tell me, which god provides these morals? The Christian god that gives all the lovely commandments as seen in this video? Is it the Muslim god which leads to this kind of behavior? Or one of the million hindu gods, or roman or greek gods of the past? Please enlighten us.

Anonymous said...

Emo,
I disagree that his argument is being torn apart.

I think what you are missing, and everyone here, is that the concept of morality coming from God does not mean morality comes from the Bible. I think you are smart enough to figure out what that means. I am actually not here to argue, and hardly ever look around here anymore, but I happened to look again today and thought John may be interested in the site, or maybe not.

Brian_E said...

Jennifer said: ...is that the concept of morality coming from God does not mean morality comes from the Bible.

And I think what you and the other poster are missing is that we have no other identifiable source of god's morality other than the bible. If you take away the bible, then by what source do you use to measure your morality? What seems moral to one person isn't to another, and without an example you now have a contradiction.

For example, was Jack Kevorkian acting amorally when euthanising elderly people who were sick and in pain? You must now provide me an answer WITHOUT referencing any specific example in the bible to justify your answer. I don't think you can do it. How about abortion? Again, same problem.

So please demonstrate to me your moral values on euthanasia and abortion without referencing the bible.

Anonymous said...

Emo,
Have you read Kant's ideas of morality? I am only recently aquainted with his writing and don't know much; in fact I first thought he did not believe that God was the source of morality, but I was corrected and am planning on reading more.

His view, from what I understand, is that we can use pure reason to think and behave morally, but ultimately the morality is transcendent.

Just this once I will answer your question about specific morality in regard to euthanasia and abortion.

I don't see any passages in the Bible that say it is wrong to aid someone in quickening a painful death. I do not think Jack Kevorkian was wise about it and I don't think it is moral for someone to take joy in ending a life. I think it's a solemn matter.
I think the case of Ramon Sampedro was handled more appropriately. The choice was his entirely up to the last minute.

About abortion...it's a complicated moral issue because of rape, incest and ignorance, but I do not think it is a moral choice because it is taking life with no regard for the life being taken. Again, it's complicated.

Another time,
Jennifer

Brian_E said...

Jennifer said: I don't see any passages in the Bible that say it is wrong to aid someone in quickening a painful death

????????

Jennifer, your homework was to answer those questions without regard of the bible! Remember, you're trying to prove that our morality comes from some 3rd party external source that you call god, and not from the bible. Yet I asked you about euthanasia and you turned to the bible.

As for your argument on abortion, you think it's immoral because it's 'taking life with no regard for the life being taken'. While I could take issue with that statement, I'd rather focus on the morality point of it. So by your argument, you could only feel this moral sense of obligation to a fetus if a god exists and granted you this morality. Does this really make sense to you? So without god, then we wouldn't feel any regard for our unborn children, and nobody on the planet would take issue with abortions. Really?

Evan said...

Jennifer,

So what you are saying is that morals are transcendent but humanity has no access to their transcendent truth but must make ad hoc determinations of what is and isn't moral based on the situation.

In what practical way is this different in the real world to the position of the atheist who says morals come from society and societal norms and nobody has full access to all morality but must make ad hoc determinations of what is and isn't moral based on the situation?