I'm not sure he is completely in alignment with me, but I'll check:
Quote:
Originally Posted by AndyJC
The flaw I am suggesting is the premise that society gets its morality from religion, whereas the truth is that religion gets its morality from society. I described how religious teaching follows developments in civic society, religions are always behind secular society. This point does not require careful definition of morality, everyone in the US today 'knows' that slavery is wrong and that stoneing adulters to death is wrong. The thing is once these moral developments become clear religions have to go through a tortuous process of reinterpreting their ancient texts to accommodate these truths.
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OK - let's go with slavery. Is slavery wrong? Today's world has plenty of "wealth" to go around, primarily due to our technology being advanced enough to extract this "wealth" from the planet, so we can easily set up methods of paying people for their work. But many many years ago, this was not the case. Slavery wasn't wrong and in fact, it was, perhaps, necessary. Much of civilization was built on slavery and bonded labour. (You could argue that while poorly treated, slaves were still fed and housed by lords who put them to work - today, people are paid and left to do that for themselves.) Religious texts being very old wouldn't make a claim that slavery was wrong because it wasn't wrong then. It is wrong now. Our views have altered and we don't need religion to tell us that - even though, if you ask preachers, they will tell you that slavery is indeed wrong. They don't need a holy text to tell them that.
So in this case, religion and society are in congruence. Do you agree? Or is your point that the bible is outdated and thus, because Christianity follows it, they don't have a grip on modern morality (likewise for other religions and texts)?
Personally, religion is a part of society, so the idea that you can separate them to say who has given who the morals is a flawed practice. I stated a while ago that my moral views were given in terms of biology and humans being a social animal. Society is just a complex form of group biology.