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[–] 2 points 3 months ago

Heh, I'm reminded of a handful of right-wing pundits who asserted torture is not that bad in 2003 shortly after the revelations at the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal turned into the CIA extrajudicial detention and enhanced interrogation program. They volunteered to be waterboarded by SERE and cracked inside minutes. The whole US torture program affair is even worse given that before the George W. Bush administration, interrogation techniques used by the US were based on the Hanns Scharff methods, which don't involve torture or any kind of coercion at all.

But my position on the risks of mores founded on religious dogma come from witnessing the rise of white Christian nationalism, which is the result of a deliberate effort to reshape Christian morality so that it's entirely unrecognizable compared to a basic reading of the bible, hence we have major religious figures asserting:
~ wealth accumulation is good
~ leaving the poor and the sick to languish is acceptable
~ tolerating LGBT+ folk is abominable
~ casting out the immigrant is righteous
~ waging aggressive war can be just.

I haven't been able to read that into the bible, and yet the churches in power here are eager to prosecute anyone who disagrees.

It's a clear demonstration that the alleged word of God can be corrupted to any purpose, and it raises a philosophical question of why our creator would provide doctrine that could be so easily misunderstood and deliberately perverted. Despite the Protestant value of Sola scriptura, the Christian is forced to choose what ministers to believe, what scholarly opinions to accept, what interpretations to accept as canon, and what passages to prioritize over others. And for most Christians, they default to whatever values they were raised with.

Dan McClellan points out the bible is neither inerrant, nor univocal, nor inspired. Also that, from the beginning, the bible has been reshaped to fit local customs and serve as a proof text. We see this in how slavery is given full-throated endorsement in both testaments, even though it is proscribed in post-enlightenment society.

We have to, as a collective, figure out on our own what our values are. Very commonly, divine command theory serves to bypass rules of reciprocity and avoidance of harm in order to serve hierarchical agendas. And history has borne this out time and again.

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