Morality guess which one the bibles ok with

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Conference and Book Fairs. Do our ethics shape the way we read the Bible or does reading the Bible shape our ethics? Is the Bible an ethical rulebook? What is our image-bearing responsibility regarding Christian ethics? Tweetables Pithy, shareable, less-thancharacter statements you can share. Conversations are happening on Slack. Become a Patron to get access. Get smarter about the Bible and stuff. In political contexts, the Bible is repeatedly invoked as if it can support one particular view, though upon a closer examination, it is quite clear that the passages mentioned if any are mentioned say little to nothing about the topic at hand.

Ephesians simply does not endorse this form of marriage. Instead, Ephesians recommends that a man love his wife and children and be kind to his slaves. In a world where slaves could not marry and where their own sexual lives were entirely determined by their masters, this teaching endorses a hierarchical household where only certain men have access to the privileges of marriage, human property, and children.

When it comes to the Bible and sex, who in your view gets it most wrong? And who gets it most right? Instead I would like to convince all of us to take responsibility for the interpretations we are promoting. I would like us to stop pretending that the Bible has been dictating our conclusions to us so that we can evaluate the implications of what we are defending.

The question for me is not whether an interpretation is valid, but whether it is valuable, and to whom. Why in your view are Americans so obsessed about sex? Why does religion collapse so readily into morality and morality into bedroom issues?

I wish I knew! Perhaps focusing on morality, especially morality in the bedroom, makes it possible for us to avoid facing other, more intractable problems. Or perhaps people are simply longing for certainty about a topic that impacts everyone, since every human person desires to be touched and loved. Every human body is vulnerable and sexual difference is one of the fundamental ways in which we experience being human.

Absolute certainty about these matters would therefore be nice, if it were available. People who cite the Bible do so to call down the authority of God on their behalf. They are asking God to take responsibility for their interpretations, because they believe that those interpretations come from God. What makes you so sure they are wrong?

Because we are human beings, not God. By claiming that we can be certain about matters that we only partially understand, we are placing ourselves in the role of God. From a Christian perspective anyway, this is a serious sin. Certainty is not granted to us.

I would defend this principle vigorously, and I deeply value its implications. Still, I cannot claim that the Bible made me reach this conclusion. Some biblical passages can support my point of view. Others do not. This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post. Stephen Prothero Profile. Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation.

Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours EST and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation. To spot contradictions in the spiritual matters of the Bible in this case, its ethics is to cut at the very heart of Scriptures.

It implies errancy in its core, a man-made fabrication, and a moral bankruptcy. Ms Knust, I believe, has ultimately shown the Bible to be a grandiose lie and her American Baptist vestment is not befitting a woman so intelligent. Her cafeteria Christianity in which she picks and chooses what parts she likes should be traded for total Secular Humanism — she can call her version Sexual Humanism.

Her calls to a Reformation inheritance is a tad off. Also a reason why a lot of blood was spilt between fighting Protestant sects. By asserting multiple interpretations based on a delineated and phallocentric text she is really more in line with 19th cent. German Protestant textual critics and with the 20th cent. Atheism of Derrida. You guys are deviating from the issue at hand. Yes he used pissed off but focus more on his submission which makes a whole lot sense. I am not anonymous.

You are wrong and hide behind your anonymity. Enough said. Waht Mahatma Ghandi mentioned about Christianity is now making sense to me. After reading your paragraphs which desperately tries to sound intelligent and noble while trying to make the bold writer naive or foolish, the statement about Christ and Christianity then made sense to me.

Your narrow and fixed judgement not only appalls but also disgusts me. How can anyone say that the Bible condones gay marriage when it says that a single instance of a man having relations with a man is a crime worthy of death? Be sure that neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor sodomites will inherit the Kingdom of God. But that was said in the Old Testamnet, before Christ came to die for us. The rules of the Old Testament with the New one?

Actually, homosexuality is also condemned in the New Testament. Romans —27, 1 Corinthians —10, and 1 Timothy — It is also indirectly condemned in the passage of Sodom and Gomorrah Genesis.

Thought I would add onto that. The author is lost, but has the right to her views. Either the Bible is inerrant or the whole thing should be thrown out as non inspired. Jesus claimed to be Lord God Messiah.

He was slain on a cross for this. At the end the Bible says. Jesus said I am the way the truth the life eternal no one comes to the Father except thru or by me. This is complete non-sense. Why does BU Today continually represent the tyranny of the minority? This paper is so blatantly trying to push a liberal agenda that it makes me sick.

The overwhelming number of great thinkers in history, and most current phsicists today, who were in fact men and women of faith, would argue that the interpretation offered here is entirely inaccurate. I was taught a version of the Bible that was literally handed down for generations, no questions asked.

I do not read it to find differences, I just read it. I am not a Biblical scholar, I do not know Hebrew meanings of words, I do not know the history of things like the excellent preacher at our church does. Just one more example of watering down philosophies that eliminate the need for convictions and repentance. I went to a Catholic high school where my friends were by far more accepting of gays than were my public school friends.

I think Christianity has a tremendous gift to bring to society but too often people focus on the those who are spreading ignorance and hatred through Christianity, and I think that hatred and blaming of Christians that comes from anti-Christians isolates those would-be Christians who would otherwise think objectively about the Bible and eventually present more open Christian views to the other Christians.

Thank you to Stephen and Jennifer for this article. I am very confused by Ms. Jesus clearly says that He is the way, the truth and the life. He also says that he is the only way to God. The Bible is the source for many of our most deeply held moral values. But the Bible is not and can not be twisted into being the source for every, tiny question we ever have about life, ever.

It is not me who needs to explain those things, but you. That is interesting. I do believe God is quite the interventionist. God intervened in the life of His creation not only when He created us but when He saved us creating the way to be right with Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

And yet he chooses not to intervene to stop child rapists, or to save starving children, or prevent tsunamis or earthquakes or hurricanes…. Thanks for your reply. As to C. Basically, any being that would allow such things when it vould easily stop them is malevolent. No, your crabbed and hidebound viewpoint is that any being that allows any evil to happen is malevolent.

This is entirely your own opinion, based on you limiting yourself to the earthly, human effects of any action.

There are lots of people who claim,that in an odd way, getting cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them. There are people who suffered unimaginably yet say it was the best thing that ever happened to them. Your reasoning is shallow. I disagree, Tyler. What was the thing gained by the child that was raped? What was the big lesson formthe millions of children that starve to desth or die from horrible diseases every year?

What was the big lesson for a quarter million people swept away by a tsunami? That God is supreme. And has divine authority and he can allow evil to touch us if we refuse to turn to him. Explain that to a child that is starveng to death or to infants and todlers killed in the catastrophe your god chose to allow.

You assume that the only thing that matters is what happens here on earth. This is the atheist self referential loop. If you want to argue with religion then you must take it as it is, not cut out parts of it. Your childish imagining is that the only thing that happens is what happens on earth, as if God should be some sort of Big Mommy in the Sky. Whether there is something to worry about other than here on earth is completely beside the point. If you can prevent a child from being raped with no risk to yourself at all and you do not, have you acted morally?

So they try to defuse the query by employing a red herring. IMO, the best counter attack is to keep repeating the question until they admit their tenuous position. Hi Pierre, I was just wondering why you believe suffering occurs? Why do you believe people do horrific things to each other? Annie — It could be for one of a number of reasons or a combination of those reasons. Among those that come to mind are anger, hatred, greed, lack of compassion, revenge, mental illness, lack of empathy, sadism, etc.

I see no differnce between the rate at which evil falls upon beleivers of any religion and the rate at which it falls upon the general population, somthat does not hold up under scrutiny. Do you believe that all evil is the result of your god choosing to allow evil, or only some of it?

If only some, how do you objectively tell the difference? At the end of the day, if you are capable of preventing evil and look the other way, you are complicit in the evil.

If I saw a child being raped, I would do all I could to stop it. That is the difference betwee me and your god. Milton — check this out. Milton — another one for you. You seem to know a lot about God. You do not know the mind of God. Oh, trust me. Evil falls in much greater rates among people who abandon the idea of God and do whatever the hell they want.

In fact, we saw some of the greatest evils fall among people who explicitly drove God out of their societies — the communists, who gloried in their atheism. As a result, they saw no problem terrorizing millions upon millions. They saw no problem killing people who were troublesome. They saw no problem in gulags and massacres. The average attendee at Sunday services commits far less crime, is involved in less of all societies problem makers such as drugs and alcohol.

So we have tried that little experiment, it was called Communism and the results are in. By and large, the people out there doing crime, whoring, taking drugs, committing armed robberies etc have little or no religious belief. It is a well established fact that the more secular a society is, the lower the crime rates tend to be. It is also a well established fact that with regard to prison inmates, Christians represent a larger percentage relative to their percentage of the overall population than atheists represent as a percentage relative to their percent of the overall population.

In either case, this of course demonstrates correlation and not causation. But then I am not claiming religion is necessarily the cause. I would add that doing the right thing out of fear of punishment or hopes of some large reward is not morality. It is selfishness. Ephesians For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no-one can boast. Hi Hugh7, I ask you in a spirit of humility and questioning, if there is no absolute truth, then how can we know an absolute reality?

I never said there is no absolute truth. I think there has to be a real universe, otherwise what is it that are we arguing about? Over the last few centuries we have discovered that reality is a lot more complicated than we thought — that everything is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space, for example.

Or that space and time are more flexible than we thought. I think we will go on discovering more and more of that kind of thing, including how we are deluded. For example we now know that we begin to move before our conscious minds have formed the intention to move.

I think no matter how much we discover, reality will always be more complicated. Romans 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. You simply shift the problem of evil to the easily observable, still with no way to explain it.

So you are claiming that reality itself is evil and life is not worth living for aggregate humanity. The most miserable life that any human ever lived is but a blink of an eye compared to the timespans of heaven.

Yes, some people are born into squalor and misery and torment on this planet from which they never escape—until death. But heaven is available to them, and that is for eternity. Without the capacity to commit evil and hurt others we would not be human beings with moral agency. But through things like disease, violence, and natural disaster we are motivated to learn about the physical world around us. If there was no distress and danger in the world, what kind of science would exist?

Would there be any reason for scientific research if there were no illness and no natural disaster?

Do you desire a world with no problems to solve? And yet I would wager, since you have time to engage in this discussion right here, that your life is already pretty close that as it is.

And yet you still view the world itself as full of inexplicable evil and torment. Are you angry at God for not making you some sort of kept animal in a video game?

No, reality is a mixture of good and evil, and for most of the world, the good outweighs the evil. First, because of our natural curiosity to find out how the universe works a universe in which science has yet found no trace of nor need for any supernatural agency.

Then because there are many issues which are not disasters. The good can be improved. The uninvented can be invented. Cellphones would still be useful even if we did not use them to summon rescue helicopters.

John, I am losing track as to who I did and did not answer. I do not see that i responded to you, so here goes:. Your claims are patently absurd. Christianity dictates that one must believe in the Christian god and in Jesus at a minimum, am i not correct? So demonstrate that those billions of people who die of starvation, and cancer, and natural disasters to the person do not fall into that category. My idea of a world with no evil is simply a world with no evil. We both have time to engage in this discussion, so whatever you wistfully apply to me, do so to yourself as well.

I will take it from your use of seven consecutive question marks that you cannot rationally address any of the points I raised, and I will pray for you. Hope you feel better. So, the quarter million people who lost their lives in the tsunami some time back were all killed because they did not acknowledge your god?

Children starve to death in Africa because they did not accept your god even though they may not ever have heard of him? Milton — your argument is that there is no God because he does not operate as sort of a Super Hero Saving Squad. This is a childish notion. God has a plan and every single human being is part of it. People died in that tsunami because spoiled cretins like me and you would rather spend time arguing with each other on the internet than developing ways to detect and alert people to natural disasters.

The technology to warn and evacuate people in tsunami zones already exists. Have you contributed anything to that field of study? Kids are starving in Africa because their parents are unable or unwilling to feed them, and because me and you are not feeding them either.

Because, according to Christianity, he designed the system that produced these results……. His alternative is to deny there is a God who cares about people because some times bad things happen. Therefore he prefers a world in which child rape, etc are simply natural occurrences, which have no intrinsic moral effects. He is acting like a baby, who wants a God who prevents each and every instance of evil, everywhere, or he is not going to believe in him.

You forget that believe in God is to also believe in Satan. There is a spiritual realm and it influences everything that happens in this world, whether for good or for evil. Satan is an awful, awful individual. He is rotten and takes absolute glee in the pain and agony and atrocities that take place in this world. They are his doing. But God allows it because he created us as free, he wants us to have the choice otherwise there is no point. And at the end of set time alloted, our choices will be rewarded eternally.

And we are offered an eternity, a promise, stated over and over again in the Bible where there will be no more suffering, no more pain, no more crying, no more dying, no more war, but everlasting, everlasting peace and safety.

An eternity with God. Sin and satan will no longer exist or threaten to touch us. But even now, the promise remains in Romans that God works all things for our good. I bhave experienced this personally. There is no lose with out gain. Look at the nation of israel. They are prime example of this truth and evidence that God does exist. They have experienced some of the worst hatred and suffering than any group of people on the earth and yet they remain and maintain their faith.

In God. After the holocaust, after great, great loss, because of it they gained back their homeland and then their capital and holy city. After thousands of years of exile, they made a great gain followingtheir great loss. Look at the life of Joseph.

He went through tremendous tragedy and set back and in the end he said what you meant for evil, God meant for good. That is the final answer. We obviously live in a fallen and wicked world. Why should that keep us from faith? It should actually increase our faith!! Because the bible doesnt say not to expect trouble, it actually promises it.

But Christ defeated him at the cross and promises to dispose of him for good at the end of the age. Until then, we have to live in the world that he is ruler of and embrace the love of God and the promise that our pain may endure through out our lives, but joy will be ours through Christ, eternally. Ultimately, faith is listed as one of 9 fruits of the spirit. It is a supernatural thing to believe.

It is not in our nature or in our surroundings, it is of God himself. For more on this, please watch this video. Are you under the impression that suffering is of no worth? I would say that it is of little to no worth, yes. Especially when one has no idea why they are suffering inexplicably.

God can, will and does intervene, especially when we seek Him. They are being the hands and feet of God, being his love in action! To believe in good, does not mean to deny evil!! It is a very real and obvious fact of life in this world.

But it does not help those who lost their lives or were permanently maimed. Heather, please ask God to cure all cancer patients in the country of Australia? Have him do it at midnight tonight. If that happens, I think a lot of atheists will become believers. Jesus and the Apostles already healed thousands and only a few were convinced. You only have anecdotal accounts.

That is wholly insufficient to support such claims. There are no medical records to consult, and no witnesses to talk to. If Jesus wanted to impress the world, he should have eliminated disease. Now that would have still resonated throughout the world. I am sorry he is not an amputee. Thousands of these on the internet. But thanks for the effort. What makes this a miracle rather than a rare event?

Yes Heather like the Salvation Army who indeed have been trying to compete with the Catholic Church when it comes to child abuse. I appreciate the good that some religious organizations do.

There is no denying it, nor would i wish to. But the question of a god preventing evil is quite apart from the question of people helping others recover because he chose to allow it to happen. All of that merely proves the existence of Satan in a fallen world. There was no such in Eden and there will be none in the New Earth. God has given us the free will to choose evil or to choose good.

Which have you chosen? No, it proves much more. Your statement implies one of two possibilities exist. The free will question does not come into play. One cannot choose not to get cancer, or not to go blind because of a parasite infection, or choose not to be swept away by some natural disaster. A child cannot choose not to starve to death because there is no food. I am nowhere addressing whether one chooses to believe in a god or practice a religion.

His ways are perfect. I do not understand them. I am not God. But the more I study His character, the more complex He becomes.

I love your thought process. I wish you Shalom. When you figure out how a supposedly completely benevolent being can commit immoral things, get back to me. I wish you well. Milton, You seem to believe that you have a unique point of view. Were you seriously seeking the answer — several people have given you suggestions for finding it. So I believe that you are not actually seeking an answer — but rather merely seeking to destroy the faith of others.

Christ came to earth. They traveled the known world — baptizing with water and the holy spirit. With difficulty, a man might give his life for his friends — but no man will give his life for something he knows to be a lie.

And most of the disciples died in very difficult fashion, for the sake of the gospel. For something they had no doubt was true. Thats the truth of the matter. The truth of Christianity is in the changed lives — not in theoretical philogenical constructs. If you truly wish an intellectual answer to your questions — read Lewis, kiirkegard, Buber. Your questions are not unique, and they have been answered.

Obviously God could stop evil. He could have made us all robots who do nothing but His will all the time.

That is obedience, but it is not love. Unlike the Muslims, we place love above submission. The true God is a God of love and He believes His children will ultimately choose to turn to love. Preventing harm to people does not in any way make the human population into robots.

What he might ultimately believe is first of all unknown to anyone. A god of love would not be a god who sits by and watches immoral things happen and does nothing. It does not matter what he ma want ir do in the future. The child was raped. The tsumani killed.

The hurricane killed….. I appreciate your honesty. That is the default position for humanity — misery exists and there is nothing ahead but death and rot. I choose to believe him. I understand those who choose otherwise. I was there for a very long time. Why do Christians make this leap? This is a false choice. You seem to think EITHER God must make humans who only obey his will, all the time, merely mindless robots, OR God must allow people to starve, must allow rapists to get off with no consequences, must allow tornadoes an tsunamis and etc.

What nonsense. I believe in the police. I believe police can exist, and stop some crimes from occurring, without totally overruling free will. I believe any god could allow a world to exist without overruling free will and yet still provide some check to the worst excesses. Why not give a child miraculous powers to stop an attacker? Or the child is starving to death, but when he prays God sends mana from heaven to help him. You are parroting an excuse for evil given to you by your preachers and teachers, but if you think about it using your own common sense you will see the excuse in inadequate.

You are wrong. He made a perfectly valid point, if a bit overstated. What would human life be like if God took away all human pain and suffering? Atheist make this goofy leap that the only good God is one that would take away human misery, because God could do such a thing.

I find his argument naive in that he equates all gods in history with the Judeo-Christian God who spoke against child sacrifice. He infers that all religions practised child sacrifice and placing children in the foundations of buildings for protection. Unfortunately, as a disciple of Christ, I agree with his point about the narcissism of Western Christianity. Under an evolutionary, scientific view the highest form of life is the human but my view is that God is even higher and incomprehensible to us as temporal beings, limited in time and space.

I do not know how I can fully comprehend the God that I consider to be transcendent. Phil, thanks for your feedback. If it does, what has been done by this god which we can all know for sure it was done by a god? Hi Pierre, I apologise for not responding to your polite questions. I have been off-line with other more pressing matters.

I am not sure if I can answer your question in a way that will satisfy you. Unfortunately I see that either scientific evolution, or belief in God god , both have a large element of faith. Neither can be proven, both require adherents to believe in aspects that have not been witnessed or proven.

My experience is a God who manifested in his creation, the sun, moon, planets, earth, animals, plants fish and birds. I cannot prove his existence to you. For me it is belief. I will inform you that my belief comes from partially from similar understandings to CS Lewis and Chuck Colson. Chuck Colson, who was imprisoned for his role in the Watergate Scandal under President Richard Nixon marvelled that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ must be fact.

There is no reason that 12 men would die for a lie. Unfortunately, all gods tend to be supported by the same kinds of weak evidence as the Christian god. Unless there is some way to really quantify this god in a realistic way, his existence will be questionable. You cannot say at the same time that you know this god and then say he is incomprehensible.

Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them. Maybe, a very weak argument, is that I know Donald Trump.