Whether it was written in Moses’ day (c. 1400 BCE) or a thousand years later, slavery was everywhere practiced at the time Leviticus was written. Like numerous other provisions in Torah, Lev. 25 sets forth rules concerning whom the Israelites could own as slaves, and if they owned any, how they were to be treated. Given the contemporaneous ubiquity of various forms of political and economic bondage, it is unremarkable that a collection of laws would include matters related to slaves. If there had been any secular society in the day, it also would have had to write such laws. What is remarkable about Lev. 25 is that it explicitly forbade the Israelites from making slaves of each other under any circumstances. That may be unique, not just for the period, but over a broad swath of thousands of years. The rationalist Greeks certainly had no qualms with enslaving other Greeks.

Contemporary attention to slavery seems focused on the African slave trade. Who was responsible for ending it? William Wilberforce. What motivated him to do it? His conversion to Christianity in 1785.

You assert that religion in the US was to blame for the Civil War, and that is certainly true – just not for the reason you imply, and I doubt you would say you prefer the peaceful alternative. The War occurred because the Abolitionists refused to accept perpetual slavery in the South. The War could have been avoided if Lincoln had permitted southern secession. He didn’t. The Abolitionist movement was founded by evangelical Christians, most notably Lyman Beecher (whose daughter wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”). Abolitionist evangelical Christian colleges were established, not that you would recognize (say) Oberlin as evangelical today. The anthem of the Civil Rights movement – “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” – is an anti-slavery ballad of deeply evangelical character. Had atheists or pragmatic scientists been in charge, the war would have been avoided and the union destroyed.

You write that the Bible approves of the subjugation of women, but to reach that conclusion you ought, like in the case of slavery, disentangle matters of doctrine from matters of contemporaneous culture and practice. For example, the passage you cite from 1 Timothy refers to worship practices of the 1st century CE. There surely are Christian sects that seek to mimic these practices, but they comprise a vanishingly small fraction of the Church. And they violate these practices as soon as they flip on the electric lights. A better place to look for a sustained commitment to (relatively) ancient rules, including the segregation and apparent inferiority of women, is in Orthodox Judaism rather than evangelical Protestantism. Yet atheistic scientists rarely object to Orthodox Jews, and routinely make significant concessions on their behalf. Does any university still hold classes on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur?

The orthodox Christian (both Catholic and evangelical) position is that women and men are equal in the sight of God. As are slaves and freemen. As are Jews and gentiles. As Paul wrote in his letter to Galatians (3:28), “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That is no defense of slavery, but rather a ratification of the inherent worth of each person and but a short step to the reasoned theological inference that slavery is an evil to be vanquished.

As an aside, I should note that Lev. 18 also prohibits child sacrifice and infanticide. This was a rather progressive notion for the time. Nearby nations did this rather routinely in pagan rituals (see Deut. 12:31. 2 Kings 17:31, Jerem. 19:5), but economic infanticide appears to have been commonplace throughout history both before and after Leviticus was written.

Leviticus 18 does condemn homosexual practice, as does 1 Cor. 6:8-10. There is no getting around it. But nowhere does the Bible condemn homosexuality as a biological orientation. Indeed, the bible forbids a long list of sexual practices including many that are clearly heterosexual, such as incest. See Lev. 18 and Deut. 27. John the Baptist was arrested (and ultimately beheaded) for publicly criticizing Herod’s incest.

The biblical moral code is fixed; you can take it or leave it, but for Christians and Jews it comes part and parcel with faith. It isn’t something that some big-haired TV preacher just came up with to sell time shares in Eternity Estates. This has been the accepted moral code in the West for millennia. Only in the past 20 or so years has there been any serious effort to contest it. You are free to adopt the view that these last 20 years are the norm and the previous few thousand are an aberration, but that’s clearly an ahistorical perspective. (Ironically, it is exactly opposite the prevailing scientific view about climate change.)

Regarding all appeals to external authority, whether ancient text or recent scientific work, a text without a context is a pretext. Your suggestion, for example, that there is a seamless web connecting millennia of Judeo-Christian morals to Adolph Hitler is too comically ludicrous to take seriously, and quite frankly, the comparison makes you appear either silly or venal.

What’s not ludicrous but dangerous is the suggestion that the world’s ills can be laid at the feet of religion but not science. A significant cadre of Western liberals believes that the effort to learn how to split the atom was a fundamentally evil act. It was the product of science; no religion of any kind was involved, except perhaps the religion of scientific inquiry for its own sake.

The BBC reported this week that infanticide may be going on in Ukraine to supply the market with stem cells:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6171083.stm“>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6171083.stm“>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6171083.stm“>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6171083.stm“>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6171083.stm

The BBC has video to back up the charge, but apparently resisted the temptation to broadcast it. Now, the BBC is not Fox News Channel and the Council of Europe (the Beeb’s source) is not some Christian propaganda outfit. COE is engaged in, among other things, combating racism, preventing torture, and (once again) abolishing slavery! (Interestingly, like George W. Bush it is generally opposed to the use of embryonic stem cells.)

But atheistic scientists have been promoting non-adult stem cells as the Holy Grail (so to speak) of biomedical therapy for the 21st Century. By promising cures for every imaginable degenerative disease, they have rather predictably stoked both market demand for stem-cell based cures and now the supply of stem cells. But if this a morally acceptable market, why is the Ukraine story news? Why not legalize the market so that poor mothers can sell their developing babies to the highest bidder? Because most of us recoil at the moral depravity of the notion that embryos, fetuses or infants are property. It is the religious among us who recoil the most. Indeed, we foresaw the market that Ukraine now serves.

Atheistic scientists seek to exclude believers from this public policy debate because they prefer to keep ethics out of the debate. This makes sense because atheism renders them ill-equipped for moral reasoning. Discovery is the thing. Mary Shelley could have written a book about it. Apropos this blog, subtitle it “The Post-Modern Prometheus.”

“Let’s not forget that the bible tells us that it’s fine and dandy to stone your children to death if they misbehave and that it’s OK to own other people as slaves.”

Ummmm…let’s not forget that many of the leading Abolitionists of the 19th century based their opposition to slavery very firmly on their Christianity, e.g.:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart3.html

“Benezet also used the biblical maxim, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ to justify ending slavery.”

How many Christians today support the owning of slaves? Not many, right? Doesn’t that mean that “a religious based moral system” is NOT “fixed and unchangeable”?

“And as for your male and female slaves whom you may have from the nations that are around you, from them you may buy male and female slaves. Moreover you may buy the children of the strangers who dwell among you, and their families who are with you, which they beget in your land; and they shall become your property. And you may take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them as a possession; they shall be your permanent slaves. But regarding your brethren, the children of Israel, you shall not rule over one another with rigor.” (Leviticus 25:44-46)

the bible aprroving of slavery

“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.”–1 Tim. 2:11-14

the bible approving the subjugation of women

“Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” Leviticus 18:22

the bibles views on homosexuality

There are many resources on religion and how it has damaged society, as well as, helped society.

The Bible, the Q’uran, Freethinkers: a History of American Secularism, The God Delusion, A Letter to a Christian Nation, Mein Kampf, Online sources such as wikipedia. There are countless sources about religion, you just have to look. Or you could just watch the news (Conservative Christians trying to overturn Roe v. Wade)

“It’s not hard to imagine all the seats at this table being filled with believers of all persuasions but it IS hard to imagine them reaching some kind of consensus. The discussions would descend into interminable theological disputes and quibbles.” Sounds like every scientific committee I’ve served on.

Several commenters have defended their opposition to the moral claims of Judeo-Christian religion by making various empirical fact statemetns — e.g., “the Bible defends slavery”; “it’s fine and dandy to stone your children to death if they misbehave”; “religion in the US was to blaim [sic] for the civil war…, continued civil rights suppression, and subjugation of women”. Responsible scientists, of course, would never make fact-claims that they cannot back up with empirical evidence from primary sources. To them I say: provide this evidence or withdraw the claims.

Communism is a political dogma similar to religion and is not synonymous with athiesm. Prior to WWII there was a christian socialist movement in the US.

Athiesm strictly means a disbelief in God. It is not a religion. Most of the violence throughout history, with the exception of communism, has been between religious factions. Religion in the US was to blaim for the civil war (the bible defends slavery), continued civil rights suppression, and subjugation of women.

A clear set of social rules can easily be formed. ie do not steal, do not injure or kill any person or animal, do not lie, do not commit adultry, do not discriminate against anyone based on race or sexual orientation.

Ethics and religion are not mutually inclusive, you can have one without the other.

Or devolve and deteriorate. See for example Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Tse Tung’s China. These were avowedly atheistic regimes (Religion is the opium of the people – Karl Marx) that actively persecuted religious believers as well as causing the deaths of tens of millions of their own citizens. Atheists hold no moral high ground over believers.

The difference is that a religious based moral system is fixed and unchangeable whereas a non-religious moral framework is based on the society we live and and is able to “evolve” and improve with time.

Let’s not forget that the bible tells us that it’s fine and dandy to stone your children to death if they misbehave and that it’s OK to own other people as slaves.

“A world run by like-thinking scientists is as horrific to contemplate as one run by like-thinking evangelicals.”

Who said that the world should be “run” by scientists? The world should be “run” (in a moral sense) by society as a whole.

I mean to say that atheistic scientists do not rely on science as the basis for their atheism. They cannot, for there are no hypotheses which can be tested that would disprove the appropriate null. Atheism is not agnosticism; rather, it is a conviction that God does not exist. That conviction cannot be achieved through scientific means. It must be obtained some other way. I suggested that this is analogous to religious belief.

Now, I see nothing wrong with that and so I do not intend the observation to be pejorative. But it does seem to me that atheistic scientists are angered by any suggestion that they believe anything that cannot be described rationally. Yet clearly they do, for a belief in the absence of God is per se belief, and it is not obtained by scientific method.

Dan,

I say it is error to make a *scientific* claim that God does not exist without relying solely on scientific methods. The use of any other methods makes the claim nonscientific. And that’s quite all right with me — just don’t hide behind the logic of science to reach a conclusion that cannot be supported by science.

I’m unsure how to respond to “TearTheRoofOffTheSucker”, whose response is neither well considered nor well written. It is true that religion has been used to justify revolting acts. But it is objectively false to say that science has not done the same. Think of eugenics. Do not reply that eugenics is but a false science; it was not considered false when it was popular among scientists.

Some religious traditions posit the existence of absolute, transcendent truth. Therefore, acts can be judged according to a constant moral standard. Science, in contrast, science denies absolute, transcendent truth. As Dan Sarewitz wrote, “there is, from the serious scientific perspective, no authoritatively rational solution to moral dilemmas…” that is, everything is subject to refutation and revision should persuasive evidence be uncovered. For the atheistic scientist, there is an exception to this rule because there is one absolute, transcendent truth: God does not exist.

Sceptical Chemist,

As an atheist you are entitled to “hold that the onus is not on me to prove that a god or gods do not exist but on those who do believe.” Fair enough. But as a Christian I did not pick this fight. I have nothing I need to prove to the satisfaction of scientists, for there are no scientific facts I wish to challenge based on my religious belief.

Rather, it is atheistic scientists who seek to rid the world of religion, not believers who seek to rid the world of science. It is atheistic scientists who wish to deny believers a seat at the table of policy-making, not believers who seek to deny seats to atheistic scientists.

In short, this is a case of asymmetric warfare.

Actually, the thought that there is no God *can* be falsified by scientific methods. If God were to write Her name in the stars (in Esperanto, of course ), then those who think there is no God would be shown to be incorrect.