You don't ask non-lawyers to figure out what the law means

During my first week of law school, I opened up my very first case in the casebook, and sat down to read a case that was less than half a page long. It took me 12 hours before I had any clue what I was reading.

And that's because its really, really, hard for a first-year student to figure out what a case is about. And that's why law school is very hard in first year, but in second year its much easier, and by third year its boring because its so easy.

But even after three years of school, I had to study for another six weeks and take the bar exam. And only after passing that would the state permit me to practice law.

And yet -- and yet, we take the Bible, which is just as hard to figure out as any case or statute, and assume that any amateur can read it and figure out what it means.

And that's how Protestantism got started, with the printing press. Before the printing press, the Bible was read only by priests and theologians (and a few rich people who could afford their own Bible). But the priests and theologians had the training to know what it was they were reading.

Once the printing press started, anyone could read the Bible, including people who had no clue how to interpret it, and then people started arguing about what the Bible really meant, and the result was religious chaos, which we still have today.

And the story of Jesus' Temptation makes it clear that even the devil can quote scripture.

So nowadays, we see people using the Bible as a weapon against Christianity, without taking into account the circumstances of the people who wrote the Bible, the circumstances of the people who originally read the Bible, and the context of the entire situation. In other words, people are interpreting the Bible with no knowledge whatsoever of what's going on behind the scenes.

 

I guess the Law and the Bible are the same. They are both a compilation of texts subject to interpretation. It always seemed like the text, itself, did not matter as much as how one was able to sell their interpretation of it. The best sellers start a religion or channel society, and the worst sink into obscurity.

 

Sounds like some fine relative morality there, about how we need to the context of the times to understand the Bible.

Is that the point, that one must embrace relative morality to understand the Bible?

 

How is that bad?

 

If we're going to judge the ancient Hebrews for being primitive savages (which they were by our standards) then we must also acknowledge that at the time the Constitution was written, our society was also primitive compared to our own.

For example, in 1776, slavery was legal in all 13 colonies, women were denied the vote and other rights, Indians were being forcibly removed from their land. And you need to know all this to understand what is meant by counting "other persons" as 3/5's of a person, or why Indians weren't counted at all.

And if you want to say the entire Constitution is invalid and worthless because Americans 200 years ago were not as "moral" as we are today, well I guess you could make that argument, but you would be wrong.

You can't just stand in the darkness of total ignorance, read a document written a long time ago, and have any clue what it really means.

 

Why couldn't God tell Moses to put a passage in the Bible saying "If you take another person as a slave, it is sinful, and you will burn for it unless you free them and beg forgiveness"?

The problem with your argument is that God is supposed to be perfectly good and all-knowing, yet said God couldn't even put admonitions against things like slavery in the book that he commanded people to write.

 

This is the California murder statute:

There is no way for a person who has no legal training to figure out what is meant by some of the words in these statutes. "Malice" is a concept defined by the common law, and you learn it in Criminal Procedure. Even the typical policeman has no clue what these statutes mean. That is why district attorneys, not policemen, decide what crime the state will charge a defendant with.

 

And do you blame God for the fact that in our current era, one in three pregnancies end in abortion? Because 200 years from now, people are going to look back on our era and they will be appalled by our immorality.

 

You'd think a perfect moral guide could have bucked the morality of the time and just stated that slavery and genocide were wrong. But it didn't.

It certainly doesn't appear to be much of a moral guide. And it's easy to understand it. It's mostly the collected myths and legends of a savage bronze-age people. What's tough about understanding that?

 

Nice try at deflection. How about you answer the question?

 

No one ever claimed that the Bible is a "perfect moral guide" so that's a strawman argument right there.

And you're perfectly right to say that the Old Testament is a collection of myths and legends of a bronze age people.

So I am agreeing with you.

And to judge bronze age people by 21st century standards is unfair. These people were doing the best they could with what they knew at the time, and they were morally far advanced compared to any of their neighbors.

And in 2000 years, it will be unfair to judge us by the standards of morality of people who live in that era.

And here's an example: slavery.

Slavery in the Old Testament was not wrong because it was morally preferable to the alternative, which was killing of captured people during a war.

Slavery in 19th century America WAS wrong because there was a good alternative, which was simply to allow the slaves to go free and pay them for their labor.

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I did answer the question. Slavery was not immoral in Old Testament times because the alternative was genocide.

 

The Founders and everyone who adheres to the Constitution did/do not claim that the document is inerrant. In fact, it was created in such a way as to change with the times. Meanwhile, a supposedly omnipotent god dictated an allegedly inerrant, unchanging book that is pro-slavery, anti-woman, and pro-child murder. Frankly, I think it's an insult to the Constitution to compare it to the bible.

 

OK, well at least I tried to use logic with you people.

 

Not much logic in comparing the Constitution to the bible.

 

You're trying to turn the Bible into something it is not, a comprehensive catechism of the rules of the faith.

The Catholic Church publishes a catechism, and it spells out the entire faith in a very comprehensive form.

That's not what the Bible is. The Bible is a collection of ancient documents that were collected over thousands of years and finally put together and published as one book. The Catholic Church teaches the Bible is divinely inspired, but not every book in the Bible is equally useful. Atheists like to grab out parts of the Bible that look bad, but they ignore the good parts. That's not an honest way to discuss the Bible.

 

All we need is an official statement from the church saying that stuff like the command to kill Amalekite infants was not actually god, and we'll go a lot easier on the book. I will, anyway. Until then, anyone who claims the accounts of god's words in the bible are accurate, and that said god is their moral guide/foundation, is seriously misguided and subject to ridicule. Seriously, the biblical god commands and condones slavery, the mistreatment of women, and the slaughter of infants. I repeat, he directs someone to kill infants. This is not a misinterpretation. This is god's own word, according to the book. It really makes me sick to think that people are okay with that kind of garbage.

 

And yet, you ignore the whole New Testament, including the Gospels. Jesus revealed on several occasions that the Jews got certain things wrong, like the law requiring adulterous women to be stoned, and the law allowing divorce, and many of the strict Sabbath laws.

 

I do. since it's happening in a country that digs Jesus more than any other western nation. explain your way out of that

 

Sorry, once a god who commands the death of babies, always a god who commands the death of babies. Are you saying 1 Samuel 15:2-3 is not correct when it quotes your god as commanding Saul to slaughter Amalekite infants?

 

the church, in the ye olden days, worked very hard to keep the bible out of the hands of the people. they didn't want ye olde joe public wising up to their book fiddling.

 

That's a lie that the Protestants like to tell. Before the printing press, each Bible had to be written out by hand and it took thousands of manhours to make each copy. So there was no possible way to spread Bibles (or any other book) except to the wealthiest people and the Church itself.

But if you had any knowledge of history, you would know that.

 

which had the added advantage of keeping the book out of the hands of joe public! for the same reason, there was long and solid resistance to putting out an English version. it was all about power and corruption.

 

It's no accident one of the first books Gutenburg printed was the Bible. Gutenburg's printing press put books into the hands of everyday people and literacy exploded. The Church at the time was a bit p!ssed off with this, because as of then, people could read the Bible for themselves and interpret the Bible for themselves and not rely solely on priests.

 

It's not as if they had any other alternative. Tyndale's Bible was the first Bible but hand written books were far too expensive for everyone to own one. While Tyndale may have written an entire English Bible, larg parts of the bible were translated several centuries earlier.

 

The Gutenberg Bible was nothing more than the Latin Vulgate in print. Only the educated elite would have read it.