Wouldn't It Be Better If Satan Was Responsible For Leviticus?

The Book of Leviticus is a doozy. Certainly an apologetic, with a little bit of shoehorning, can make it seem not so bad. It was, after all, written for a specific audience during a specific time in history for specific reasons.

Too often, however, everyday folks cherry-pick things from Leviticus to validate all sorts of ugliness, most notably homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

However, when we read more than just those few segments of Leviticus that might seem to validate some of our own personal prejudices, we see that these cherry-picked lines that are often held as God's truth in 2012, are nested in with a whole lot of downright horrible, or just plain ridiculous, commandments.

Take these for example:

"For everyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother. His blood shall be upon him." (Leviticus 20:9)

"And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbor's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death." (Leviticus 20:10)

"If a man lies with a woman during her sickness and uncovers her nakedness, he has discovered her flow, and she has uncovered the flow of her blood. Both of them shall be cut off from her people." (Leviticus 20:18)

"Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property." (Leviticus 25:44-45)

"Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard." (Leviticus 19:27)

"And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire." (Leviticus 21:9)

"...and the swine, though it divides the hoof, having cloven hooves, yet does not chew the cud, is unclean to you." (Leviticus 11:7)

"...do not plant your field with two kinds of seed. Do not wear material woven of two kinds of material." (Leviticus 19:19)

"A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20:27)

"But all in the seas or in the rivers that do not have fins and scales, all that move in the water or any living thing which is in the water, they are an abomination to you." (Leviticus 11:10)

Now, I don't care who you are, or what time you're living in, this is some of the worst advice you could possibly give to anyone, anywhere. As I often tell my children, 'I don't care what they did to you, violence is never the answer.' They understand this. God apparently does not -- at least not according to his word.

So often, when we bring up these insane passages from Leviticus, the Christian retort is something like, "Oh, well, Jesus came along and tossed that stuff aside. That's the old covenant. Jesus brought with him the new covenant."

Which is all fine until we also take into consideration that Christians believe Jesus and God to be one and the same. Jesus is, after all (according to Christianity), part of the Holy Trinity. Jesus is Lord, right?

So, this means we are to believe that God in his God form said a bunch of crazy stuff to a certain group of people. Then God in his man form came along and said not to pay attention to the stuff that he said in his God form because that stuff was a little much.  If God knew everything he knows now, and he should (he's God after all), his morality should not have changed over time -- or at least it should never, under any circumstances, at any time whatsoever, have involved child-killing or enslavement.

If we are also to believe that God is all-knowing (including all scientific and medical knowledge), and that he is all-loving and the source of morality, we have to accept that his commandments to these people were totally lacking in scientific and medical knowledge, and that his morality is easily questionable -- even by simple human beings such as you and I.

Take slavery (please!). You would think that under no circumstances could God, the source of morality for the three Abrahamic religions, possibly endorse slavery. It's not even like he was ambiguous about it. Leviticus is very clear on how slavery works, including the minor details of slave-keeping, -selling, and -trading. It's pretty embarrassing, actually.

The below video, by NonStampCollector illustrates just how horrible the slavery laws in Leviticus are, by presenting us with a scenario that would actually be more believable than believing that God would be cool with slavery: Satan, ever the trickster, takes a pen to God's manuscript, turning his very ethical guide on the treatment of other humans into a horrible, slavery-condoning nightmare. Only someone as terrible as Satan could possibly come up with such morality, right?

We can only conclude that flawed humans wrote Leviticus, that morality evolved over time, and that new scripture had to be written later to catch up with the human morality that allowed us to view Old Testament morality as immoral.

We can also conclude that if you use scripture from Leviticus, or anywhere else in the Bible for that matter, to validate the discrimination or mistreatment of other human beings for any reason, you're relying on the archaic morality of Bronze age desert tribesmen.

Are Shifts In Religious Morality The Result Of Secular Pressures?

Recently, over at Professor Jerry Coyne's blog, there was a discussion about a female pastor in South Carolina who had abandoned her religious teachings about sexual behavior in favor of practical measures such as handing out condoms and urging people to get tested for HIV.

A reader of Coyne's blog stated that this was a prime example of "religion being pushed into a moral change, not by any theistic insight, but through applying basic secular morality to the situation."

Coyne added:

...There’s neither a method nor an inherent trend in theology to reassess and alter its moral stands in view of changing conditions. Religious morality appears to change under only two conditions: either secular morality moves ahead of religious morality, causing it to change (e.g., treatment of women and gays or, in this case, condom use and birth control), or scientific advances show that the scriptural basis of religious morality is simply wrong (e.g., there’s no Adam and Eve and hence no Original Sin).

If a religion’s moral dictates remain fixed in stone for centuries, even under the press of secular advances, then that religion loses adherents. This, of course, is what is happening to Catholicism in so many places.

This sentiment is something that I have spent considerable time debating with friends and acquaintances -- the fact that religious morality is quite often inferior to a morality derived from secular values. In other words, there are many instances of morality in religion which, despite being handed down by a supreme deity, actually cause harm to others and diminish overall well-being. In many instances, not only is harm directly inflicted on others, but the groundwork is laid for a pattern of suffering, and for an extension of suffering into other areas of humanity.

For example, we know that religion is, more often than not, the source of anti-LGBT bigotry. It is rare to hear an argument against homosexuality or same-sex marriage that does not invoke religion. Yet, we are starting to see an evolution in some religious bodies, as some churches are beginning to soften their stance on homosexuality. I don't believe you would see many instances of religious bodies initiating these changes on their own, without pressure from outside. Most often, we see secular shifts in attitudes (pro-LGBT equality sentiment in popular culture, the legalization of same-sex marriage or the extension of benefits to same-sex partners) long before we see major shifts in attitudes within religious bodies. This seems to be the same cycle to which Coyne is referring.

An excerpt of the Dalai Lama's forthcoming book, Beyond Religion: Ethics For A Whole World, was recently posted on The Huffington Post.

In his book, the Dalai Lama urges humanity to accept a "new model for mutual respect and understanding - rooted in our shared humanity - between religious believers and non-believers."

The excerpt dovetailed nicely with the sentiment expressed in Coyne's blog post.

The Dalai Lama writes:

Certainly religion has helped millions of people in the past, helps millions today and will continue to help millions in the future. But for all its benefits in offering moral guidance and meaning in life, in today’s secular world religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics. One reason for this is that many people in the world no longer follow any particular religion. Another reason is that, as the peoples of the world become ever more closely interconnected in an age of globalization and in multicultural societies, ethics based in any one religion would only appeal to some of us; it would not be meaningful for all. In the past, when peoples lived in relative isolation from one another -- as we Tibetans lived quite happily for many centuries behind our wall of mountains -- the fact that groups pursued their own religiously based approaches to ethics posed no difficulties. Today, however, any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate. What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.

I am confident that it is both possible and worthwhile to attempt a new secular approach to universal ethics. My confidence comes from my conviction that all of us, all human beings, are basically inclined or disposed toward what we perceive to be good. Whatever we do, we do because we think it will be of some benefit. At the same time, we all appreciate the kindness of others. We are all, by nature, oriented toward the basic human values of love and compassion. We all prefer the love of others to their hatred. We all prefer others’ generosity to their meanness. And who among us does not prefer tolerance, respect and forgiveness of our failings to bigotry, disrespect and resentment?

The Dalai Lama isn't speaking directly to the secular pressures upon religious bodies to change their morality. However, in so many words, he is saying that religious morality is inferior to secular morality in terms of obtaining a universal state of minimized suffering and an increased overall well-being for humanity.

While I normally would not compare the Dalai Lama with Sam Harris, it would be egregious to avoid mentioning the similarity of the Dalai Lama's premise with that of Sam Harris' in The Moral Landscape. In his book, Harris argues that "morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures...if there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world—and there clearly are—then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality."

Harris, on the flawed morality of the Catholic Church:

Consider the Catholic Church: an organization that advertises itself as greatest force for good and as the only true bulwark against evil in the universe. Even among non-Catholics, its doctrines are widely associated with the concepts of “morality” and “human values.” However, the church is an organization that excommunicates women for attempting to become priests but does not excommunicate male priests for raping children. It excommunicates doctors who perform abortions to save a mother’s life—even if the mother is a 9-year-old girl raped by her stepfather and pregnant with twins—but it did not excommunicate a single member of the Third Reich for committing genocide. (It excommunicated Joseph Goebbels, but this was for the high crime of marrying a Protestant.) This is an organization that is more concerned about stopping contraception than stopping genocide. It is more worried about gay marriage than about nuclear proliferation. Are we really obliged to consider such a diabolical inversion of priorities to be evidence of an alternative “moral” framework? No. I think it is clear that the church is as misguided in speaking about the “moral” peril of contraception, for instance, as it would be in speaking about the “physics” of Transubstantiation. In both domains, it true to say that the church is grotesquely confused about which things in this world are worth paying attention to. The church is not offering an alternative moral framework; it is offering a false one.

History offers many examples of secular morality effecting change in religious morality. Although there are still examples of public stoning being validated by religious belief, it is not tolerated by most religious bodies, despite its prevalence in scripture. Biblical instructions on how to keep slaves are ignored. Many churches now allow women clergy. These are but a few examples of shifting morality within religious institutions. Most often the shifts occurred as the actions, commands, or instructions in scripture became viewed as incompatible with society by those outside of the church. Sure, religious people have played a role in shifting morality from within (religious people have certainly been instrumental throughout history in condemning slavery, segregation, anti-LGBT bigotry, etc.), but it is often a case of the religious rejecting religious doctrine.

In other words, even though there are examples of religious justification for the rejection of doctrine (i.e. 'Jesus said love thy neighbor, therefore I cannot condemn my homosexual neighbor), we must not lose sight of the fact that such examples are a rejection of religion-based morality (i.e. 'homosexuality is an abomination.')

As the Dalai lama suggests (as does Harris, to a lesser degree), a secular morality does not require that one discard religion. However, both point out that we cannot rely on religion to dictate our shared morality. We must, instead, seek common denominators in a universal morality: morality which meets the criteria of a secular morality (i.e. 'acting with the intention of reducing suffering and maximizing well-being for all'). Both Harris and the Dalai Lama state that if our religious morality dictates that we act in a way that does not reduce suffering or maximize well-being, then that particular piece of guidance should be rejected.

The Dalai Lama writes:

I am of the firm opinion that we have within our grasp a way, and a means, to ground inner values without contradicting any religion and yet, crucially, without depending on religion. The development and practice of this new system of ethics is what I propose to elaborate in the course of this book. It is my hope that doing so will help to promote understanding of the need for ethical awareness and inner values in this age of excessive materialism.

At the outset I should make it clear that my intention is not to dictate moral values. Doing that would be of no benefit. To try to impose moral principles from outside, to impose them, as it were, by command, can never be effective. Instead, I call for each of us to come to our own understanding of the importance of inner values. For it is these inner values which are the source of both an ethically harmonious world and the individual peace of mind, confidence and happiness we all seek. Of course, all the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness, can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I believe the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics that is beyond religion.

There are many current examples of religious morality that does not meet this 'common denominator' requirement. In Uganda, we are seeing faulty religious morality in the Kill-the-Gays bill. Here in the US, Michigan's anti-bullying bill protects religious tormentors. The Catholic church is attempting to ban insurance coverage of contraception, despite the fact that the pill is crucial to the treatment of many women's health issues unrelated to contraception. Same-sex marriage opponents cite religious reasons for the denial of rights to LGBT citizens. Each of these instances of religious morality, among many others, result in the suffering of others, as well as a diminishing of the well-being of entire swaths of the population. Such religious morality is inferior to secular morality. You will be hard-pressed to find a plurality of secular justification for the same moral conclusion.

It is because of secular pressures that we will eventually see shifts in religious morality. Regardless of the resistance to change, one would be foolish to predict that religion will not eventually budge on each of the above stances (and others).

While it is true that many religious people are pushing for similar change, we must remember that they are pushing for the rejection of religious morality according to doctrine. They are pushing for their religion to embrace attitudes already embraced by a secular morality based on the enhancement of human well-being and individual responsibility, and the elimination of human suffering.

Ask Sam Harris A Bunch Of Stuff

Sam Harris, author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape, answers questions submitted by readers. This is his second entry in this series (the first can be found further below).

The full video is an hour long. Links to specific topics/questions are provided below:

1. Eternity and the meaning of life 0:42
2. Do we have free will?  4:43 
3. How can we convince religious people to abandon their beliefs? 14:52 
4. How can atheists live among the faithful? 19:09 
5. How should we talk to children about death? 21:52 
6. Does human life have intrinsic value? 26:01 
7. Why should we be confident in the authority of science? 30:36  
8. How can one criticize Islam after the terrorism in Norway? 35:43
9. Should atheists join with Christians against Islam? 41:50
10. What does it mean to speak about the human mind objectively? 45:17 
11. How can spiritual claims be scientifically justified? 50:14 
12. Why can’t religion remain a private matter? 54:52  
13. What do you like to speak about at public events? 58:09 

Sam's first entry in this series is below (without the handy chapter links, unfortunately).

Toss The Ten Commandments

Do a Google News search for "Ten Commandments" at any time, and you will find hundreds of articles about dozens of flaps over the placement of the commandments in public spaces -- courtrooms, schools, parks, etc.  The Ten Commandments have become such a monolith of our culture that many assumptions are made about them, the most common being that the United States is a Christian nation with founding documents steeped in Judeo-Christian dogma, and as such the nation was founded on God's law. 

While courts continue to argue their appropriateness in courthouses and schools, it seems that we never stop to consider whether or not The Ten Commandments themselves are a useful tool in guiding our morality.  The Ten Commandments are something that nearly everyone is familiar with, as a concept, and as a sum of its parts.  But so many of us, even many Christians and Jews, could not recite them, even out of order, if our lives depended on it. In 2007, in a survey conducted by Kelton Research, 80% of those surveyed knew that "two all beef patties" were ingredients in a Big Mac, but only less than 60% knew the commandment "thou shalt not kill." Sixty percent of those surveyed could not name five of The Ten Commandments. (If you're feeling self-conscious now, feel free to brush up on them here.)

Even if we could remember The Ten Commandments, how useful are they in actually dictating our morality? We often hear people say things like, "Without The Ten Commandments, people would have no reason not to kill or steal."  Comments like that make me wonder about the moral fabric of the people who say such things.  Is a simple commandment the only thing standing between them and cold-blooded murder, or a shoplifting spree? 

Dan Barker, a former Evangelical Christian preacher, songwriter, and performer, has spent some time dissecting The Ten Commandments and gauging their usefulness.  In various writings, including his book Godless, he has pointed out that only three of the Ten Commandments have any relevance to American law: homicide, theft, and perjury.  He points out that Adultery and Sabbath laws are on the books in some states, but are artifacts of theocracy. 

Commandments one through four (no other gods, graven images, Lord's name in vain, and the Sabbath) have absolutely nothing to do with morality, offering no suggestions on how we should treat each other.  We've nearly gone through half of them and have only been told how we can please the Abrahamic God. 

The Fifth Commandment, "Honor thy father and thy mother," is the first one that even begins to sound moral.  It's decent enough advice, but, as Barker points out, it's vague (how exactly do we honor them?) and in some instances could end up badly (what if your parents are abusive, or terrible advisors?). 

"Thou shalt not kill," the Sixth Commandment, is a good one.  It took us six commandments to actually get to a moral statement, one that addresses doing actual harm in the real world.  Although, Barker notes, it doesn't tell us what we should do about war, capital punishment, self defense, and other ways in which killing is legal in the United States. 

"Thou shalt not commit adultery," Commandment seven, is also good advice, but not against the law. 

Commandment Eight, "Thou shalt not steal," is good advice, and is the second commandment that actually applies to our laws. 

The Ninth Commandment, "Thou shalt not bear false witness," is also good advice, but lies are only occasionally illegal in America, under very specific circumstances.   And although this is generally good moral advice, there are instances when following this commandment would cause more harm than not following it.  There is the old thought experiment where you are housing Jews in Nazi Germany, and a Nazi soldier comes to the door to ask if there are Jews in your home.  This is a time when our natural empathy and morality trumps any absolute on a stone tablet.

The Tenth Commandment, "Thou shalt not covet they neighbor's wife/house/ox, etc." -- this is ok advice, but hardly something that pertains to American law.  Barker points out that without a nation of Tenth Commandment-breakers, "our entire system of free enterprise would collapse."

So, after going through The Ten Commandments, Barker says, we have "four religious edicts that have nothing to do with ethics, three one-dimensional prohibitions that are irrelevant to modern law, and three shallow absolutes that are useful but certainly not unique to the Judeo-Christian system."  Barker states that any one of us could very easily come up with a more sensible, thorough, ethical code for human behavior.

It should be clear, after actually examining and thinking about The Ten Commandments, that they serve no purpose in a courtroom (or school, etc.) other than to bolster those who are adamant that America is a Christian nation.  A judge could glean no legal advice from any of the commandments, of which only a few apply in any way to US law. 

The Ten Commandments are interesting from a historical perspective.  It serves a population well to be religiously literate.  We certainly are better off knowing and understanding them, and where they came from, than knowing the ingredients of a Big Mac.  But if we believe that these are our best moral guide, we are fooling ourselves.  We could toss The Ten Commandments as a moral guide, and replace them with one suggestion that, if followed, would provide an actual moral and ethical code: Always act to minimize the suffering and increase the well-being of living things.  It is a guideline that does not rely on absolutes and requires that we analyze our actions and weigh the outcomes of each choice we make.  And in another two thousand years, it will make as much sense to those still walking the earth as it does today.