Notes From Day Seven: Don't get your ethics from the Bible
This past Sunday I spoke at my church. If
you attend a church on Sunday mornings,
you know that the priest, minister or pastor
who is speaking will usually base his or her
message on a small section of the Bible. I
follow this practice myself, and on Sunday I
spoke about a passage that the Apostle Paul,
a.k.a. Saint Paul, wrote to the first Christians
who had started to meet together in Rome.
At that time, around the year 50, Rome was
the capital of the Roman Empire.
In the passage, Paul wrote about the way Jesus Christ changes lives. He said that Christ transforms people from the inside out. The members of that Roman church had to work through those changes to become a more cohesive community.
Paul told them that each of them had to use the abilities that God had given them for the betterment of the community. There was to be no false pride, but rather humility in the way each person used their abilities. The apostle also wrote that each church member had to work on loving others from the heart and on being cheerful. Instead of loving only friends while turning enemies away, the members of that church were supposed to love all people, even finding ways to make their enemies happy (this directly replicates the teachings of Jesus). God, said Paul, wanted the people not to be bested by evil, but to best evil with good.
Today this kind of ethical teaching is very typical in Christian churches all over the planet. And there are scores, if not hundreds, of pages of such ethics and supporting stories throughout the Christian Bible.
Why then do some of today's popular advocates of atheism such as Richard Dawkins claim that people should definitely not get their ethics from the Bible?
You can find the answer to that question by watching their debates on YouTube. And the answer you find is this: The Bible contains many ethical teachings, mainly in the Old Testament, the earlier parts of the Bible, that are not acceptable. For example, it contains stories of God's people killing others to take their land, an example that is a favourite of Dawkins'. The Old Testament contains condemnations of homosexual behaviour along with — to us, strange — negative understandings of menstruation, the mixing of fabrics, women, and the “uncleanness” of diseases and certain animals such as pigs.
There are many questions concerning those Old Testament ethics. Do those stories and ethics present us with the ethical goals God has in mind for people today? How much of the command for God's people to “ethnically cleanse” the land came from God and how much of it was a human construction? Did the battles they waged take place exactly as the writers wrote them up?
And how did the ethics and practices of God's people in the Old Testament contrast with the ethics and practices of the people around them? For example, the latter engaged in child sacrifice. The story of Abraham being stopped from sacrificing his son appears to teach, among other things, that with the people of God, child sacrifice has no place.
These kinds of questions, however, appear to be invisible to Dawkins and his comrades in battle. At the same time, as I watch his debates I feel that he becomes more human than the Dawkins who writes acidly in his books. In conversation with Christian thinkers he appears to understand that his objections to Christianity are not as water tight as his writing suggests they are. This is understandable. He is after all — and I don't mean to say this in a condescending way — a biologist, not a biblical scholar or a theologian.
But finally, to the question Dawkins and company raise: If we should not get our ethics in conversation with the Christian Bible, where should we look? The answer that Dawkins repeats over and over again is that we human beings are entirely capable of generating healthy ethics without the interference of God — or since “God does not exist,” the interference of those who claim to know him such as the writers of the Bible.
Now this strikes me as naïve. It is all well and good for Dawkins to say that we can find our ethics without “God” or people and texts that claim to know God. But he says those things within the safety of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and within the safety of Western European values and societies that have been thoroughly Christianized (much to the consternation of grumpy British atheists). As an aside, it is worth remembering that Oxford and Cambridge Universities were not founded by atheists, but by the church, which believed that God's creation was worth studying. My point is that Dawkins' opportunity to speak his mind freely is the result of values and ethics that are highly informed by the Christian tradition, and are profoundly the better for that. It is unlikely that his anti-god views would find publishers in, say, Egypt.
So, which people should we trust to provide the ethics and values we should live by? Should we trust the Eastern thinkers who impose a caste mentality on the people of India? Should we trust the business leaders and lawyers of Bay Street? Should we trust big oil companies to provide us with ethical guidance? Maybe it should be the Supreme Court of Canada or the Stephen Harper government. Or should it be Canadian historians or veterans associations?We can find ethical guidance from human beings everywhere we look: from the novels of Margaret Atwood to the London chapter of the Hells Angels.
Some communities of people have generated very disturbing ethical systems. The Maoist government of China for example gave its people the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. Before that there was the French Revolution with piles of heads liberated from the body. In between there was the American Revolution which turned the eastern half of the now United States into what we would see as third-world war zone complete with massacres of Indians and religious communities. Or maybe we should turn to the Canadian visionaries who stole land from natives, built railroads with Chinese slaves, and are currently doing all they can to maintain our addiction to fossil fuels even while that addiction is causing the planet to burn up.
I take it that the ethics of the KKK, Nazis, and others extremist groups are not on for nearly every reader of this piece. However, it is sobering to realize that they were human organizations who constructed ethics that worked for them.
Absolutely, there's no need for us to get our ethics in conversation with the writers of the Bible. But if that's the route we go, well, good luck. The going may get a lot rougher than it needs to be.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.
In the passage, Paul wrote about the way Jesus Christ changes lives. He said that Christ transforms people from the inside out. The members of that Roman church had to work through those changes to become a more cohesive community.
Paul told them that each of them had to use the abilities that God had given them for the betterment of the community. There was to be no false pride, but rather humility in the way each person used their abilities. The apostle also wrote that each church member had to work on loving others from the heart and on being cheerful. Instead of loving only friends while turning enemies away, the members of that church were supposed to love all people, even finding ways to make their enemies happy (this directly replicates the teachings of Jesus). God, said Paul, wanted the people not to be bested by evil, but to best evil with good.
Today this kind of ethical teaching is very typical in Christian churches all over the planet. And there are scores, if not hundreds, of pages of such ethics and supporting stories throughout the Christian Bible.
Why then do some of today's popular advocates of atheism such as Richard Dawkins claim that people should definitely not get their ethics from the Bible?
You can find the answer to that question by watching their debates on YouTube. And the answer you find is this: The Bible contains many ethical teachings, mainly in the Old Testament, the earlier parts of the Bible, that are not acceptable. For example, it contains stories of God's people killing others to take their land, an example that is a favourite of Dawkins'. The Old Testament contains condemnations of homosexual behaviour along with — to us, strange — negative understandings of menstruation, the mixing of fabrics, women, and the “uncleanness” of diseases and certain animals such as pigs.
There are many questions concerning those Old Testament ethics. Do those stories and ethics present us with the ethical goals God has in mind for people today? How much of the command for God's people to “ethnically cleanse” the land came from God and how much of it was a human construction? Did the battles they waged take place exactly as the writers wrote them up?
And how did the ethics and practices of God's people in the Old Testament contrast with the ethics and practices of the people around them? For example, the latter engaged in child sacrifice. The story of Abraham being stopped from sacrificing his son appears to teach, among other things, that with the people of God, child sacrifice has no place.
These kinds of questions, however, appear to be invisible to Dawkins and his comrades in battle. At the same time, as I watch his debates I feel that he becomes more human than the Dawkins who writes acidly in his books. In conversation with Christian thinkers he appears to understand that his objections to Christianity are not as water tight as his writing suggests they are. This is understandable. He is after all — and I don't mean to say this in a condescending way — a biologist, not a biblical scholar or a theologian.
But finally, to the question Dawkins and company raise: If we should not get our ethics in conversation with the Christian Bible, where should we look? The answer that Dawkins repeats over and over again is that we human beings are entirely capable of generating healthy ethics without the interference of God — or since “God does not exist,” the interference of those who claim to know him such as the writers of the Bible.
Now this strikes me as naïve. It is all well and good for Dawkins to say that we can find our ethics without “God” or people and texts that claim to know God. But he says those things within the safety of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and within the safety of Western European values and societies that have been thoroughly Christianized (much to the consternation of grumpy British atheists). As an aside, it is worth remembering that Oxford and Cambridge Universities were not founded by atheists, but by the church, which believed that God's creation was worth studying. My point is that Dawkins' opportunity to speak his mind freely is the result of values and ethics that are highly informed by the Christian tradition, and are profoundly the better for that. It is unlikely that his anti-god views would find publishers in, say, Egypt.
So, which people should we trust to provide the ethics and values we should live by? Should we trust the Eastern thinkers who impose a caste mentality on the people of India? Should we trust the business leaders and lawyers of Bay Street? Should we trust big oil companies to provide us with ethical guidance? Maybe it should be the Supreme Court of Canada or the Stephen Harper government. Or should it be Canadian historians or veterans associations?We can find ethical guidance from human beings everywhere we look: from the novels of Margaret Atwood to the London chapter of the Hells Angels.
Some communities of people have generated very disturbing ethical systems. The Maoist government of China for example gave its people the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. Before that there was the French Revolution with piles of heads liberated from the body. In between there was the American Revolution which turned the eastern half of the now United States into what we would see as third-world war zone complete with massacres of Indians and religious communities. Or maybe we should turn to the Canadian visionaries who stole land from natives, built railroads with Chinese slaves, and are currently doing all they can to maintain our addiction to fossil fuels even while that addiction is causing the planet to burn up.
I take it that the ethics of the KKK, Nazis, and others extremist groups are not on for nearly every reader of this piece. However, it is sobering to realize that they were human organizations who constructed ethics that worked for them.
Absolutely, there's no need for us to get our ethics in conversation with the writers of the Bible. But if that's the route we go, well, good luck. The going may get a lot rougher than it needs to be.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.
