By Religion: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

By Religion: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Do the Math: How many people do you know who have worked on a Saturday? How many have doubted God aloud? How many are gay? How many practice another religion—or none at all? How many teenagers have talked back to their parents? How many adults have had sex outside marriage? How many women would survive a virginity inspection conducted by Bronze Age elders?

Would your mother pass? Your sister? Your best friend? Would you?
By Religion: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
If these laws were enforced, modern society would collapse into a bloodbath within weeks. That is not rhetoric; it is arithmetic.
The Apologetic Escape Hatch

Believers often respond with a familiar refrain: “Those laws no longer apply.”
Then a fair question follows: by what authority were they revoked?

The same book that commands these killings also insists that God’s law is eternal and unchanging (Psalm 19:7; Malachi 3:6). Jesus himself explicitly affirms Old Testament law, declaring that “not one jot or tittle” would pass away (Matthew 5:17–18).
So who changed the rules? God—or humans?

And if humans are free to discard the parts they find immoral, what exactly makes the remaining parts divine?
Morality Didn’t Come from the Bible—It Escaped It

The uncomfortable truth is this: modern morality did not come from biblical law; it arose in opposition to it. The abolition of the death penalty for heresy, the end of religious violence, the protection of women, children, and minorities—all emerged from secular legal systems, Enlightenment philosophy, and human rights movements that explicitly rejected theocracy (Pink er, The Better Angels of Our Nature; Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration).
The Church did not lead this progress. It resisted it—often violently.

So when believers claim moral superiority based on scripture, they are quietly relying on values that contradict it.
The Question That Won’t Go Away

If your holy book commands you to practice acts that would today be classified as crimes against humanity, how holy is it really?
And if you would never carry out these commands—if you recoil at them—what does that say about the source of your morality?
Did it come from God?
Or did it come from being human?
Sources

The Hebrew Bible / Old Testament (NRSV, JPS Tanakh)
Friedman, Richard Elliott. Who Wrote the Bible?
Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible
Barton, John. Ethics in Ancient Israel
Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature
Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entries on Theocracy and Biblical Law

F. B.