But I say to you who are hearing, Love your enemies, do good to those hating you, bless those cursing you, and pray for those accusing you falsely; and to him smiting thee upon the cheek, give also the other, and from him taking away from thee the mantle, also the coat thou mayest not keep back. And to every one who is asking of thee, be giving; and from him who is taking away thy goods, be not asking again; and as ye wish that men may do to you, do ye also to them in like manner; and — if ye love those loving you, what grace have ye? for also the sinful love those loving them; and if ye do good to those doing good to you, what grace have ye? for also the sinful do the same; and if ye lend to those of whom ye hope to receive back, what grace have ye? for also the sinful lend to sinners — that they may receive again as much. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again, and your reward will be great, and ye shall be sons of the Highest, because He is kind unto the ungracious and evil; be ye therefore merciful, as also your Father is merciful. And judge not, and ye may not be judged; condemn not, and ye may not be condemned; release, and ye shall be released. Give, and it shall be given to you; good measure, pressed, and shaken, and running over, they shall give into your bosom; for with that measure with which ye measure, it shall be measured to you again.
– Some weird dude named Jesus. No wonder they killed Him.
Absolutely, Mung.
At my school, there was a standing prize (your own choice of a bible or a complete Shakespeare) for learning all three chapters by heart.
Good stuff.
Yes, Mung, that’s my understanding of Christianity.
But very little of that exists in America today. You will still find it in the liberal denominations. But those who proclaim Christianity the most loudly often seem to be the opposite of what Jesus taught.
Thanks Elizabeth.
And Neil, I can’t say I disagree with you other than to offer the possibility that it exists in more of America than you might think..
I’ve traveled a long way from the Baptist upbringing I had. But then again, maybe not so far 🙂
As you probably know, Mung, as I’ve written about it in these parts before, I was an enthusiastic Christan for half a century, my first religious experience being at the age of about three, and my final departure at exactly some date, but I’d have to look it up. I think I was 55.
The Christianity I adhered to is essentially summed up in the Sermon on the Mount. The boarding school I went to was a Quaker boarding school for girls, called “The Mount”, hence the prize (although it was actually named for a very small rise in ground level, south of York city centre, on which it stood). And not only the pun on the name – the principles the school taught, as part of its Quaker philosophy, were pretty well summarised in that text.
I got my complete Shakespeare, and can still recite long bits of it, in the RSV version! And it’s what kept me in Christian denominations all through, including my time in the catholic church, which I joined as a young adult. Its philosophy was what I thought of as being referred to by the adjective “Christian”, and my family would describe an act as “very Christian”, whether the actor was or was not a nominal Christian, if it was one done in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.
And to some extent, religion-less as I now am, I remain, at least in terms of my moral outlook, a Christian in that sense. It’s what I admire about the Christian project as it were.
But what has become horribly clear to me of late, is that so much of what goes under the banner of “Christianity”, particularly the kind often, ironically to me, prefaced as “bible-believing Christianity” is profoundly anti-Sermon-on-the-Mount. One error Matthew made was that jot and tittle thing. If only those jots and tittles really would pass away. Trying to reconcile those OT jots and tittles with the message on the Mount is simply impossible. The God of the OT is simply unrecognisable in that sermon and vice versa. The jealous, lying, genocidal, psychopathic tyrant of the OT is almost the polar opposite from the Mount guy.
And forced to choose, too many nominal Christians seem to go with the OT.
Oh, and Paul. Don’t get me started on Paul…
All of which is not, I should add, an attack on Judaism. Judaism, as far as I can see, has a much healthier and intelligent traditional approach to those scriptures than Christianity has. The error, in my view, was in making the biblical collection a canon, compounded later by regarding it as inerrant.
Elizabeth, you hate Paul because Paul specifically addressed homosexuality?
Or was it because of what he had to say about women?
Both?
Do you doubt that Paul was a Jew and that his views on both homosexuality and women were not at odds with his fellow Jews?
I don’t “hate” Paul. I’m not a hater. I think he was wrong about lots of things, including women.
On the other hand, 1 Corinthians 13 is one of the most beautiful spiritual texts ever written.
So no, I don’t hate Paul. I just don’t regard biblical texts as being infallible. But the Sermon on the Mount is good, and 1 Corinthians 13 gives a spiritual underpinning to the instructions in Matthew 5 to 7. And there are parts of John that I love.
In other word, I think that Christian scriptures are a mixed bag, but there are some fantastic bits. I used to think the fantastic bits were the essence of what people called “Christianity”. I’ve subsequently discovered that there are other bits that people regard as equally canonical, and which I utterly reject.
So I don’t call myself a Christian any more. But the texts I learned and loved as a teenager are still part of what drives me.
I once heard a homily (by a Dominican), on some Pauline epistle or other, in which the preacher started by saying “I think it would be a mistake to be too hard on Paul for what he says here”, then added “although not, of course, as much of a mistake as not being hard enough…”
One of my favorite translations of the New Testament is this one:
By a Jew, no less. 🙂
My favorite text from it:
Mercy can freely boast that it has nothing to fear from judgement.
Mung:
Well, at the time they couldn’t just disappear his posts and ban him.
Elizabeth
The problem is that Christians will defend their faith by – quite rightly – pointing to New Testament passages like the Sermon on the Mount which embody all that is best about the it.
At the same time, they will justify their opposition to homosexuality by citing a line from Leviticus while quite happily ignoring all the other appalling moral prescriptions in the book which, to my mind, is a real cesspit for this sort of stuff.
Yes, I agree, Seversky.
That’s why it’s important to start with morality, then pick your texts, not the other way round.
IMO. I never thought Euthyphro’s dilemma was much of a dilemma!
Seversky appears to be ignorant of the New Testament. Elizabeth expresses her agreement with his ignorance.
In fact, the New Testament condemns certain behaviors. It was written by Jews, you know. People who had read Leviticus. So no surprise there.
Not sure why you think either of us are “ignorant of the New Testament” Mung. Neither of us, for instance, has said that the New Testament does not condemn certain behaviours. I even mentioned Paul myself.
I think people — believers and not — shop for scripture that supports what they want to do. It’s called cherry picking. Secular believers call their scripture “studies”.
I judge people by what they do rather than by what tribe they belong to or what team they support. What I dislike is not believers per se, but authoritarian and controlling people. I find them in all churches and all political parties.
Sure, but there’s a difference between: scripture says this, therefore it is right. and: is: this is right, therefore it is scripture.
The second requires that we have some other basis for deciding what is right, of course, but it isn’t “cherry-picking” so much as sorting wheat from chaff.
Right. Which is why the strapline of this site is what it is.
I cherry pick religion and science and philosophy for good ideas, but the ideas have to stand on their own.
Withe the possible exception of Buddhism (and maybe Quakerism and a few other outliers) , religion is received ethics and morality.
For the most part, religious people identify with tribes. they have creeds to recite, books to read, foreskins to snip, rituals, meetings. Solidarity.
I have never in my life been able to identify with a movement. I have not belonged to a church since age 14. I sang in a choir for 10 years without joining the church. I like the music.
I identify with no political party and am saddened when someone I respect makes tribal noises.
Agreed, Petrushka. I do belong to a political party, but I do not “identify” with it. I just think it’s broadly the one most likely to deliver government on the kinds of principles I hold, and that therefore I should give it some help.
Above I posted:
Added to my post:
I assume this is Mung’s comment (it is his thread). Whoever added it, I’d appreciate your refraining from doing so in the future.
Yes. Can I remind thread-starters not to moderate their own threads, even though you technically have that capacity.
I have not yet found a way of setting permissions so people can post OPs and not have editing rights, so it is an honour system.
In any case, we do not edit posts, except to delete malware and porn links, or identifying info. No Loudspeaker in the Ceiling.
I’m a bit puzzled as to the purpose of this post. Is it to remind us that Jesus was a wise person who expressed profound ethical truths? Well, some here might dispute that, but I certainly wouldn’t! (And not just in the “some of my best friends are Christian” sense, but rather, in the sense that some of my closest spiritual advisers and guides are followers of Christ. Others aren’t.)
On the other hand, if one’s version of “Christianity” is basically that one can pick and choose arbitrarily (from the rational point of view) between which verses of the Old Testament to take literally and which ones not to, then one is neither a good Christian nor a good Jew — one is simply a thug.
Amazing innit? Must be their Christian morality thing. It would never cross my mind to modify someone else’s post with my own words. That’s just so despicable it’s beneath contempt. Yet ID Creationists like Barry, KF, Sal, and Mung do it without a moment’s hesitation. Tells you all you need to know about their integrity level.
I often refer to myself as an atheistic Christian. That always gets Christians hot under the collar. They always claim that you can’t be an atheist and a Christian. To me it is simple. I accept many of his teachings as being a good way to lead my life (hence Christian) but I don’t believe that he was/is a God and I don’t believe that there is a god.
Acartia,
That seems reasonable to me. Ultimately, it’s all about how one sees the relationship between ethics and metaphysics. The good folks at UD insist that ethics must be grounded in metaphysics. I find the arguments for that assertion less than persuasive.
To me it seems so obvious that our ethics and morals are the result of the fact that we are social animals. But to the good folks at UD it is not obvious. When you point out to them that other social animals have their own version of ethics and morals they eventually resort to statements like ‘they can’t be the same because chimps will sometimes kill the baby of another chimp’, being completely blind to the fact that you could make the exact same statement about humans.
In my mind, ethics and morals are nothing more than the rules that we as a society have agreed to live by.
Frank Schaeffer’s book, with a somewhat similar title, is free on Kindle today LINK. Schaeffer’s view is that it was the enlightenment, rather than the Church, that carried forward the most important part of the Christian tradition. I think he may be right about that.
Reciprocating Bill,
IDIsts can’t fucking help themselves marking up others posts.
Acartia,
Two comments — I shall attempt to be brief (not my forte) –
1. There is a fundamentally important difference between justifications and explanations, between whether someone did (or thought) as they should have done and what caused them to do (or think) as they did.
Although non-human primates have something very much like ethics, and it’s extremely likely that our capacity for ethical reasoning was brought about evolutionary pressures (including natural selection), that doesn’t mean that we can appeal to anything biological when we attempt to justify, or give reasons for, what we do and what we think.
By contrast, theological ethics does attempt to use theology to justify what we do and what we think. So we’re not much using biology where they use theology, but refusing to answer the questions that theists believe must be answered.
2. There’s a deep tension between thinking that ethics is the result of natural selection acting on mammalian (esp. primate) sociality and thinking that ethics is the result of agreement between individuals. I don’t think that those are actually compatible. More on that thought later, though.
Lizzie:
Lizzie,
Did you see Paul Barthmaier’s offer? He might be able to help out with things like this.
keiths,
There does not seem to be any way to separate being able to publish and being able to delete and edit in that thread. Using Role Editor allows some fine tuning but publishing and editing/deleting are interlinked. I suspect it would need major rewriting to get round this.
ETA contributor role would work with the drawback that publishing requires admin authorization.
KN, stating that ethics are the rules that we all “agree” on is probably a poor choice of words. A better description of what I mean is that humans start out with the same “rules” as are seen in most social animals. But that our brains give us a level of reasoning, predicting consequences, that is unprecedented amongs life on earth. As such re live by rules that are innate, learned and reasoned at. But even the learned ones are the result of our ability to reason. The “rules ” that tend to be wide spread are the ones that we all agree on. But this isn’t to say that this agreement came from formal discussions and debate.
Ethics and morals are restaurant food; parenting is home cooking.
Minor correction : *Allegedly* some weird dude named Jesus.
Acartia,
Yes, something like that is probably true. Certainly there’s a strongly biological basis to many of our moral (also aesthetic and epistemic) values. But I suspect that only human beings have moral norms, if (as I think) norms require shared or collective intentionality, and that is a form of intentionality that is unique to human beings (if Tomasello is right, and I think he is).
On the other hand, it’s certainly been argued that animals can be moral. I can’t say whether I think Rowlands is right, since I haven’t read his book, but the general line of argument seems cogent. The question then would be, if both Tomasello and Rowlands are right, what difference does collective intentionality make to animal morality? And I would say that it gives us the ability to recognize reasons as reasons, to respond to reasons as reasons, and to revise our reasons in light of how others critically examine the reasons we have.
Richardthughes,
Since we have no basis other than the Gospels for Jesus’s actions and sayings, it’s hard for skepticism to get much of a grip here.
It’s much like the Socrates problem: we don’t know what the actual Socrates said, since all we have are dialogues that his students wrote as a homage to him. Of those dialogues, only those of Plato and Xenophon have survived the millennia. We have good reasons to believe that Socrates was a real person, and had some profound impact on the lives of people who knew him or who knew of him; the same point applies to Jesus.
When it comes to talking about “what Socrates said” or “what Jesus said,” we’re making claims that are intermediate between “what Epicurus said” (since we do have some of his writings, though not many) and “what Trimalchio said” (since he’s a fictional character in Satyricon). But as long as we’re clear that we’re taking about works of literature that are inspired by, and written in homage of, real people who very likely said and did things similar to what is attributed to their literary counterparts, we’re not likely to go wrong.
In any event, it is the Jesus of the Gospels and the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues who have taken on a life of their own in the history, politics, philosophy, religion, and science of Western civilization — so in that sense, they are vastly more important than the real people who inspired those stories.
Kantian Naturalist,
Yes and no – I doubt his words would be known at all without the claim he was divine.
There’s a fair amount of relevant scholarship. For instance, it’s highly implausible, in light of what’s known about the Roman handling of religious insurrection, that Jesus spoke with Pontius Pilate. I recommend streaming the Public Broadcasting System documentary From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians. It features a number of scholars talking expertly about stuff that challenges conventional beliefs. I’m sure that’s as much up your alley as mine.
With no more evidence than the texts themselves, it’s clear that there are multiple Jesuses in each of the Gospels. “Jesus” contradicts himself rather freely. The Sermon on the Mount and the parables differ radically in message and in style. No one reading them without a prior commitment to “book belief” would deny that they seem to come from different sources.
By ‘joined’, does this mean you were baptised and became a Catholic, i.e. experiencing the sacrament of confirmation, or that you just ‘joined in’ and attended Mass for some period as a young adult? A lot of people seek social clubs & a sense of belonging which they may indeed find in religious communities. The Christian church’s ‘love of its enemies’, following the example and teachings of its founder, even while imperfect, is indeed a ‘strange’ feature of Christianity across societies globally.
I was already baptised, Gregory, as an infant, so I did not require a second baptism, but apparently a second confirmation was required. By “joined” I mean “I was received into the catholic church”.
No, I did not join because I was seeking a social club, nor a “sense of belonging”.
Nonetheless I was an active participant in the musical life of the parishes I subsequently became part of, and even taught Sunday School for many years.
I hope that clarifies my meaning.
Elizabeth,
Thanks for the explanation.
Thanks! That would be brilliant.
Tom English,
Interesting! I know of some of the evidence for the different sources of the Gospels, hence some discrepancies, but I did not know that it is unlikely that Jesus met Pilate. That’s very interesting — thank you! I’m somewhat more familiar with the documentary hypothesis or the construction of the Old Testament, though I’m more familiar with the arguments in favor of it than the arguments against it.
My introduction to that in Bible 101, back in 1974, went a long way to get me reading scripture as a discerning adult, rather than as a credulous child. The preacher boys — there were quite a few of them, in a section of 230 at a Southern Baptist school — were somewhat less than pleased with the professor. I’m speaking here of guys who already knew what was what, before entering college. Some of the pre-ministry students were intelligent, open, and reflective.
Biblical archaeology has come a long way in the past quarter-century or so. I’d say that the findings have considerable bearing on the documentary hypothesis, though the Wikipedia article says nothing about them. I’m going to recommend yet another PBS film you can stream, The Bible’s Buried Secrets. You’ll find a synopsis and some reviews at Wikipedia. What surprised me most was the strong evidence that the early Israelites worshiped a fertility goddess, Asherah, along with Yahweh.
P.S.–I do read, but not in this area anymore.
Elizabeth Liddle:
LoL. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.
Reciprocating Bill:
It was me. There’s already a thread here at TSZ for the topic you are attempting to introduce into this thread. But you probably already knew that.
I can promise to refrain from posting porn.
Meanwhile, over at UD, Elizabeth brags:
And now we know that’s just not true.
Elizabeth Liddle:
That’s not entirely true. You do edit posts. And you edit posts and delete content that is not malware, is not links to pron, and does not contain identifying info.
For the record, was it you who deleted what I wrote, Elizabeth?
Mung,
Really Mung? Have a word with yourself. Always striving for us to be as bad as UD.
Tom English:
That’s pretty obvious.
You still up for an elementary stats lesson, Mung?