Sunday, April 8, 2007

Foolishness

These days I hear so much about how the bible is a source for the Judeo-Christian morality that so dominates the world today. Even Nietzsche, an Atheist if there ever was one, believed that if God was done away with (Meaning, if a person was an atheist) then it was ridiculous to not do away with the Judeo-Christian morality that claims the commandments and literature of that God to be the source of modern morality.

Nietzsche would be correct to do away with modern morality if it were true that it was sourced primarily in a faulty religious tradition. Yet this is not the case, it has not been the case for millenia, I have my doubts that it was ever truly the case (Though the conditions under which religion was created are mysterious to me beyond all other things). Morality has changed and evolved throughout civilization, it has its origins in religious and secular tradition, in religions now dead and religions currently alive. Throughout this evolution our concept of morality, the things we have deemed worthy of law and the labels of 'good' and 'evil.'

There is no singular source of modern morality. To misunderstand or deny this is a path to nothing but evil. No single tradition, not even the Judeo-Christian tradition with the bible can claim to have a stranglehold on modern moral thought. The bible itself is not the source of any beliefs - what people take from the bible, how they interpret it morally - this is a subjective act. The morality that people claim originated within the bible really finds its source in human moral intuition. Nothing else.

The atheists morality tends in large part to be the same as the reasonable Christian's morality. This is the case because the reasonable Christian looks to the bible and discards that which is clearly nonsense and preserves only that which makes sense. When something is unclear, the reasonable Christian withholds judgment and defers to his moral sensibilities. Ultimately, these moral sensibilities are the source of morality - the bible is just a convenient mirror.

But it is a broken mirror, the fundamentalist movement has proved this if nothing else.