Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [41]
Similarly, for those who have succumbed to the temptation of the flesh at some time in your married life, Deuteronomy 22:22 does not bode well: “If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman; so you shall purge the evil from Israel.” Do Jews and Christians really want to legislate biblical morality, especially in light of the revelations of the past couple of decades of the rather low moral character of many of our religious leaders? Most don’t, but believe it or not some do, even advocating returning to stoning as a proper form of punishment.
(To the religious right who lobby for the Ten Commandments to be posted in public schools and other public venues, please note that the very first one prohibits anyone from believing in any of the other gods besides Yahweh. “Thou shall have no other gods before me” is a passage indicating that polytheism was commonplace at the time, and that Yahweh was, among other things, a jealous god. By posting the Ten Commandments, we are sending the message that any nonbeliever, or believer in any other god, is not welcome in our public schools. This is not an attitude in keeping with the U.S. Constitution and is rightly prohibited by the First Amendment.)
To be fair to believers, not all biblical ethics are this bad. There is much to pick and choose from that is useful for our thinking about moral issues. The problem here is consistency, and selecting ethical guidelines that support our particular personal or social prejudices and preferences. If you are going to claim the Bible as your primary (or only) code of ethics, and proclaim (say) that homosexuality is sinful and wrong because the Bible says so, then to be consistent you’ve got to kill rebellious youth and nonvirginal premarried women. Since most would not endorse such an ethic, why target gays and lesbians but cut some slack for rebellious youths and promiscuous women? And, on the consistency issue, why aren’t men subject to the same set of sexual guidelines as women? The answer is that in that culture at that time it simply was not appropriate. Thankfully we have moved beyond that culture. What we really need is a new set of morals and an ethical system designed for our time and place, not one scripted for a pastoral/agricultural people who lived four thousand years ago. We should think through these moral issues for ourselves instead of turning to what is largely an antiquated book of morals.
This is, in fact, one of the primary goals of the modern skeptical movement that has grown dramatically over the past quarter century (and the subject of my book The Science of Good and Evil). Skepticism, of course, dates back to the ancient Greeks, well captured in Socrates’ famous quip that all he knows is that he knows nothing. Skepticism as nihilism, however, gets us nowhere and, thankfully, almost no one embraces it. The word skeptic, in fact, comes from the Greek skeptikos, for “thoughtful”—far from modern misconceptions of the word as meaning “cynical” or “nihilistic.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, skeptical has also been used to mean “inquiring,” “reflective,” and, with variations in the ancient Greek, “watchman” or “mark to aim at.” What a glorious meaning for what we do! We are thoughtful, inquiring, and reflective, and in a way we are the watchmen who guard against bad ideas, consumer advocates of good thinking who, through the guidelines of science, establish