Posted by
The Secular Conservative on Saturday, January 06, 2007 12:29:47 AM
To those who say that we get our values from religion and, in particular, the Bible, I'd like to attempt a response.
One recent argument, as part of the fray from Ellison taking his oath on the Koran, suggests that the Constitution is sufficient to provide Americans with values, and the Bible itself isn't necessary. Dennis Prager opposes this argument by saying that the Soviet Union had a similar constitution, but didn't adhere to it, so there must be another source of values.
"For the United States, [the source of our values] has been the American Christian's understanding of the Bible." (January 4th broadcast)
Knowing how Dennis likes to be logically consistent, I think even he can appreciate how his Soviet constitution argument actually undermines the biblical argument. The argument is basically that
a) The constitution states certain values
b) But those values are not upheld in practice
c) The written word is not the demonstration of values, which come from the actual behavior of people
d) Therefore, if people's actions don't match the values espoused in a constitution, the constitution is clearly not the source of values
If we apply this same logic to the Bible (note the parallel arguments):
a) The Bible asserts certain values
b) Hopefully no one honestly believes that biblical values are upheld in practice, like slavery, genocide (Joshua 6), incest (Genesis 19), and gang rape (Judges 19). Clearly, these are not our values, but they were all practiced by biblical patriarchs.
c) The written biblical word is not the demonstration of values, and our actual behavior differs.
d) Therefore, since people's actions do not match the values espoused throughout the Bible, the Bible is clearly not the source of values
So what is the source of our values? I'm leaning towards the Richard Dawkins response: the moral zeitgeist.
“In any society there exists a somewhat mysterious consensus, which changes over the decades.”
“The consensus has no obvious connection with religion. It extends, however, to most religious people, whether or not they think their morals come from scripture.”
“Modern morality, wherever else it comes from, does not come from the Bible. Apologists cannot get away with claiming that religion provides them with some sort of inside track to defining what is good and what is bad… They cannot get away with it, not even if they employ that favourite trick of interpreting selected scriptures as ‘symbolic’ rather than literal. By what criterion do you decide which passages are symbolic, which literal?”
The obvious answer is the moral zeitgeist.
-tsc