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Ch. 10: The Bible and Morality

#58: Dec. - Jan. 2009 (Non-Fiction)
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Chris OConnor

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Ch. 10: The Bible and Morality

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Ch. 10: The Bible and Morality

Please use this thread to discuss this chapter. :smile:
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realiz

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Page 170
Speaking for myself, if the biblical heaven and hell exist, I would choose hell. Having to spend eternity pretending to worship a petty tyrant who tortures those who insult his authority would be more hellish than baking in eternal flames. There is no way such a bully can earn my admiration.

Barker seems to forget that his admiration was there for fifteen years during which he did study and read his bible. Did he ever really believe in the bible or was it just an act? The bible did not change during this time, it was not as if he was unaware of what the bible said. There is something that just does not seem completely authentic about Barker.

P161
During all my years of preaching, I simply assumed that the bible was the rock-solid foundation of morality, and it nevr crossed my mind to examine that assumption. Yet as a morphed from faith to reason, I started looking at the "Word of God" in a different light.

Interesting word, morphed. How does one morph from faith to reason? This would make more sense to me if he was someone who had not looked too closely at the bible during his years of faith. But he studied theology, he read the bible. This man seems to have a good mind, but did he not even notice these things before? What made him believe so literally in the first place?

Barker spends most of this chapter quoting the bible and making fun of the contradictions in morality, which are quite humorous though not overly intelligent or thought provoking. His arguments sound very adolescent, so I am not sure who he is preaching to. Most of what he is pointing out would be known to anyone who has read even parts of the bible, so how can believers not know that the bible is contradictory and difficult to follow as a moral compass?
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Robert Tulip

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Thanks Realiz, I am not planning to read this book, but I hope people don't mind if I comment on some of the posts about it. It seems to me there is a syndrome of shallow atheist thinkers commenting on religion in ways that avoid discussion of the deep issues at stake but rather hold to a very superficial level. For example, in your quotes above, Barker holds to an assumption that heaven and hell are spatial, where I would argue a deeper reading of the Bible reveals these concepts as primarily experiential. This is a conceptual/categorical distinction which some people find hard to grasp because the popular spatial metaphor has such a strong hold. Barker has proved nothing through his epiphany that the Bible is inconsistent. From your comments I get the impression that he never engaged with Anselm's injunction that faith should seek understanding, but rather held to a set of shallow mythological literal doctrines that he accepted on authority, and he has subsequently 'morphed' (maybe 'flipped' is better?) across to an equally shallow and doctrinaire atheism. Based just on this example the sort of "leadership" that Barker offers the atheist movement has disturbing similarity to the "leadership" offered by some charismatic preachers, ie one that presents an arrogant but partial claim to explain the truth rather than a nuanced understanding of complexity, while ignoring the value of dialogue and the different levels of meaning that are available in texts. RT
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Robert Tulip wrote:Thanks Realiz, I am not planning to read this book, but I hope people don't mind if I comment on some of the posts about it. It seems to me there is a syndrome of shallow atheist thinkers commenting on religion in ways that avoid discussion of the deep issues at stake but rather hold to a very superficial level. For example, in your quotes above, Barker holds to an assumption that heaven and hell are spatial, where I would argue a deeper reading of the Bible reveals these concepts as primarily experiential. This is a conceptual/categorical distinction which some people find hard to grasp because the popular spatial metaphor has such a strong hold.
Robert, I have no idea what you mean by "spatial" versus "experiential." Maybe you can explain that?

As for a deeper reading, I suppose that's possible if you already have an emotional connection with the Bible or you are projecting your own complicated worldview into its text, which possibly removes it too far from its historical context. I gather from what you've posted on BT before that your reading of the Bible is atypical at best, and I mean that as a compliment.
Last edited by geo on Wed Dec 03, 2008 2:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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realiz: "Did he ever really believe in the bible or was it just an act? The bible did not change during this time, it was not as if he was unaware of what the bible said. "

No, Barker changed, that's explained in the title of the book.

realiz: "What made him believe so literally in the first place?"

Indoctrination?

realiz: "Most of what he is pointing out would be known to anyone who has read even parts of the bible, so how can believers not know that the bible is contradictory and difficult to follow as a moral compass?"

Maybe you're missing his point. He points out obvious contradictions showing that the bible shouldn't be used as a moral compass at all, not that it's just difficult to follow.
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RT: "shallow and doctrinaire atheism"

Does atheism even have depth? He's not writing this book to explain how he now views the world, he's writing this book to show why he no longer believes in religion. Perhaps what you see as a shallow atheistic stance is simply all it takes to make the argument against religion from what he formerly believed.

And doctrinaire? Use of the word implies he doesn't have sufficient reason to disbelieve in religion. Maybe since that's all he had was faith, he doesn't need to shine the light of reason on too many areas.
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Maybe you're missing his point. He points out obvious contradictions showing that the bible shouldn't be used as a moral compass at all, not that it's just difficult to follow.
All I am saying is what he is pointing out is already pretty obvious. If he is trying to help people to see things in a different light he needs to delve a little deeper.
No, Barker changed, that's explained in the title of the book.
I sort of expected a little more of an explanation than the title of the book. The title indicates that it will be explained in the body of book, which, so far, I haven't really got a grasp on his transformation. I know he went from believing literally in everything the bible said to believing it is utter trash, but I still feel like I am missing his internal struggles through this process. I also feel like he is still arguing on a very superficial basis rather than a deeper one.
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realiz wrote:
All I am saying is what he is pointing out is already pretty obvious. If he is trying to help people to see things in a different light he needs to delve a little deeper.
I actually agree with realiz here. I'll tell you in a minute why I'm posting this Far Side cartoon (not that anyone needs an excuse to sprinkle Far Side cartoons into their posts).

Image

Clearly, Barker is devastatingly effective in arguing against a literal interpretation of the Bible, which of course is his own previous position. It's hard to imagine any believer walking away from reading these middle chapters unscathed (but then again they want to believe and there's the rub). Where Barker really shines, of course, is in his familiarity with the Bible. And though this Ch. 10 starts with a rehashing of the inconsistencies and problems of the Old Testament, I think he's spot on with his assessment of the New Testament as a questionable document indeed for basing moral beliefs. I look forward to the upcoming chapter that questions whether Jesus really existed.

As for that Far Side cartoon . . .

from Richard Dawkins' forward . . .
It isn't difficult to work out that religious fundamentalists are deluded-those people who think the entire universe began after the agricultural revolution; people who believe literally that a snake, presumably in fluent Hebrew, beguiled into sin a man fashioned from clay and a woman grown from him in a cutting . . . . My mistake has been naively to think I can remove this delusion simply by talking to them in a quiet, sensible voice and laying out the evidence, clear for all to see. It isn't as easy as that. Before we can talk to them, we must struggle to understand them; struggle to enter their seized minds and empathize.
So far, I don't see Barker doing much to try to understand the believers. Instead, he's like the guy in the Far Side cartoon above, picking a fight with the easiest target in the room. His formidable skills of rhetoric are total overkill against the rather rudimentary beliefs of evangelical Christianity. Is it any wonder this guy likes to debate Christians? As good as Barker is at debunking a literal interpretation of the Bible, I've seen no acknowledgment of the fact that this is not the typical Christian position. It's a fringe position. Many, if not most, people who consider themselves Christian don't believe in the Bible literally. (I would say they're not being intellectually honest, but that's a subject for another post.) Barker himself believed in a literal interpretation and, yes, he proves to be quite adept at picking it apart. It makes for interesting reading, but so far in this book Barker doesn't bring much new to the table, IMHO.
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geo wrote:Robert, I have no idea what you mean by "spatial" versus "experiential." Maybe you can explain that?
Traditionally, heaven has been interpreted as a place where good Christians go when they die. This is what I call a spatial model, including the refinement of the old triple decker flat earth cosmology into the idea of heaven as the afterlife of the individual soul, existing with God and retaining unique identity for the rest of time. I cannot image that this afterlife model is scientifically possible, given what we know of physics.

My approach is to ask how the Biblical comments about heaven and hell can be interpreted as metaphors for something that is scientifically possible. This is actually a lot easier and more fruitful than some might imagine. It relies on the assumption that the Biblical writers had an idea of something true and good that they explained in the language available at their time. For example in The Lord's Prayer Jesus tells us to pray 'your will be done on earth as in heaven'. This asks us to imagine how the will of God is done in heaven, and seems to be defining heaven as an ideal template, a vision of what the earth could be. Rather than a separate spatial realm, heaven is a goal of the world transformed by Biblical values of love, peace, truth and justice. The concept of heaven finds reality through human experience of putting divine values into place, which is why I call it experiential rather than spatial.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says 'blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.' To me this means that by living simply we can focus on the divine values of truth, love, peace and justice, and transform the earth. It is a call to transformation, not escape. Now I accept this is confused by parables such as Dives and Lazarus, where the rich man goes to hell and the poor man goes to heaven, but again this is a spatial metaphor for an experiential claim. The natural selfish human genetic instinct to want to live for ever has turned these metaphors into dogmatic myth. The challenge now is to strip away the dross of dogma and folk tradition to find the meaning within.
RT
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Interbane wrote:Does atheism even have depth?
Yes, I think so. Depth would be shown in a number of specific ways, but in general, depth increases as blanket rejection of religion decreases. To have a personal nonbelief is one thing, but to insist that the world must conform to tenets of that view is another. One can be an atheist yet not declare that Christianity is null and void in the sense that it has had no effect on on the worldview one has adopted, or that it had nothing to do with the formation of institutions that are essential to us today. One can be an atheist without discounting the whole subject of religion as not worth our attention, without saying that William James wasted his time writing The Varieties of Religious Experience. One can be an atheist, in other words, while remaining a liberal humanist, a designation that indicates "depth" as well.
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