This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Monday! Time once again for Monday School – STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday”  (and every other day of the week)!

Today’s Lesson: Can The Bible Serve As The Basis Of A Sound System Of Morality?

As long-time students of Monday School should be able to deduce from previous lessons, the answer is clearly “No!” The Bible simply approves of too many morally atrocious actions to be taken seriously as a sound moral guide. Its many contradictory commands (for example, Jesus condemns sword use in Matthew 26:52 but then tells people to buy swords in Luke 22:36) further diminishes its credibility.

Those who remain unconvinced of the Bible’s moral bankruptcy are encouraged to review this catalog of eye-opening passages provided by the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible.

Some apologists attempt to minimize these obvious sins of the Bible by assigning them to its human authors while claiming that the God who allegedly inspired them remains forever morally pure. There are numerous problems with this approach, however:

1) How do these apologists know this? They don’t seem to say. Instead, they seem to have embraced this hypothesis merely because it allows them to continue to believe what they want to believe rather than because evidence exists to support it.

2) How is it that a perfect God can so imperfectly inspire people? Or to put it another way, why would a perfect God with a perfect message of crucial importance rely upon such imperfect authors to relay that message?

3) If the authors of the Bible can so thoroughly screw up such an important part of God’s message, why should we believe anything they have to say? How can we have confidence in any of their claims?

Perhaps the most important objection I have to the claim that God is pure even if the Bible is flawed, however, is this: The conception of God that the Bible gives us is so thoroughly atrocious that little remains of its God if one strains out its morally offensive flaws. It’s not as if the Bible’s authors got God’s hair color or accent wrong, after all – it’s that their basic description of His actions and intrinsic character are morally repugnant. If we reject that basic description, virtually nothing of God remains.

Consider:

The Bible’s depiction of God as a being who indulges in indiscriminate destruction, inherited guilt, and collective punishment, as well as a being whose judgment may be manipulated by those in-the-know, adds up to a curious being indeed: namely, a God who is neither omniscient nor just. This comes out even more clearly when one reflects upon the fact that the Bible’s God is consistently unable to separate the sin from the sinner. Time after time, this God entirely destroys a complex person for a single act or flaw even though no person is wholly evil and an offended Supreme Being could easily have just prevented or reversed the offending act. What the Bible’s God chooses to do instead makes little sense, but it precisely parallels this God’s alleged destruction of families, nations, whole peoples, and even most life on earth merely to punish, remove, or “get at” a single transgression or trait. A truly just and sane deity could be expected to look at a flawed person, tribe, or species and simply remove the flaw. In sharp contrast, the Bible’s God sees a flaw, flies into a rage, and engages in an orgy of indiscriminate destruction precisely the way an emotionally immature and intellectually-stunted child might. Such a conception of God may have induced fear in primitive people but can hardly serve as the basis of a sound system of morality today.

Although God is now generally considered to be perfect by definition, the God of the Bible is clearly imperfect in that He has no sense of proportionality. The idea that the punishment ought to fit the crime apparently never occurred to Him (or those who invented Him). James 2:10 makes it explicit: “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.” Deut. 27:26, Matt. 5:19, and Gal. 3:10 reflect a similarly bizarre concept of justice. From first page to last, the Bible would have us believe that God is utterly unable to distinguish between sins. The mass murderers of the world are one with those who take the Lord’s name in vain or do a bit of work on the Sabbath. All merit the same punishment (though God overlooks or pardons the sins of some of his favorites such as Moses and David when He feels like it – no reason given). It is difficult to see what sense this makes or what ennobling lessons we might take from it. Attempts to apply the ways of the Bible to life today seem certain to make our lives worse – not better. Does anyone seriously advocate that our legal system ought to model itself after a book which puts forth such bizarre theories of justice as “the sins of the fathers shall be paid for by their children down to the third and fourth generations” (Exodus 20:5)? Exactly how may we apply such extreme and misdirected conceptions of justice in our personal or professional lives and avoid being labeled insane tyrants? Exactly how many prisons will we have to build if we agree with Jesus that merely wanting to commit an immoral act is morally indistinguishable from actually doing it (Matt. 5:28)?

For all these reasons (and more), the Bible fails us as a moral guide.

If you simply MUST look to a religion to provide guidance in this area, try Buddhism or Confucianism rather than Christianity. As near as I can tell, they’ve managed to avoid most if not all of the flaws outlined above and (perhaps not coincidentally) seem to have had a much less unfortunate impact on individual people as well as human history as a whole.