Thursday 23 August 2007

Somewhere else

Dawkins: Well, not really because no serious theologian takes the Old Testament literally anymore, so it isn't quite like that. An awful lot of people think they take the Bible literally but that can only be because they've never read it. If they ever read it they couldn't possibly take it literally, but I do think that people are a bit confused about where they get their morality from. A lot of people think they get their morality from the Bible because they can find a few good verses. Parts of the Ten Commandments are okay, parts of the Sermon on the Mount are okay. So they think they get their morality from the Bible. But actually of course nobody gets their morality from the Bible, we get it from somewhere else and to the extent that we can find good bits in the Bible we cherry pick them. We pick and choose them. We choose the good verses in the Bible and we reject the bad. Whatever criterion we use to choose the good verses and throw out the bad, that criterion is available to us anyway whether we are religious or not. Why bother to pick verses? Why not just go straight for the morality?

And where does the morality come from? Where is this mysterious "somewhere else"? Sounds like a fudge to me!

 

 

 

 

No comments: