7 Ways the Bible Will Make You an Immoral Person

[Kyrios]

• 7. The Bible has immoral instructions.
  
  The Bible says that women are property and should be silent in church and obey their husbands. The Bible says it’s okay to beat your slaves as long as you don’t kill them. The Bible says to kill your children if they talk back to you. The Bible says to kill witches.
  
  If you follow every word of the Bible you will be a murderous villain. Period. The only way to be a “good” Christian (by modern, Western cultural standards) is to ignore these parts of the Bible or reverse engineer excuses for why you don’t have to follow them.
  
  6. The Bible tells you that sinners are evil.
  
  Granted, there’s the old Christian saying, “Love the sinner. Hate the sin.” But let me point out one flaw in that logic. God loves the sinner but hates the sin, right? Yet ultimately God is going to punish the sinner with everlasting torture for being such a horrible villain.
  
  If God is going to treat sinners with hatred and kill them then how likely is it going to be for a Christian to rationalize hating, mistreating and killing sinners? History and world news shows that hurtful and murderous Christians aren’t a rare anomaly. They’re an inevitability produced by a wicked moral guide.
  
  5. The Bible tells you to love everybody.
  
  In and of itself this sounds great. In practice it’s terrible for two reasons. First, this moral lesson is vague to the point of being useless. What is love? Should you love an invading army? Should you love a serial killer? Should you love Hitler? Should you love criminals? In what way? To what extent? It doesn’t say. It doesn’t offer any clear guidance.
  
  If you follow an unclear moral code your decision making process will be unclear. So you’ll have to rely on some other form of guidance, like instincts, reason, culture or other people’s advice. But if we’re going to end up relying on other methods of guidance anyway then why not cut out the distraction and rely on the final source of guidance to begin with?
  
  The second reason this commandment is bad is because the Bible has already told us to hate, hurt and kill sinners and infidels. These contradicting moral messages will paralyze your ethical decisions. It becomes exceptionally difficult to know which path to take, especially if you’re a simple minded person, which most people are. Again, since the Bible offers unclear guidance then ultimately you’re going to have to end up making your moral decisions based on what you think is right. Again, if this is the case then why not just cut out the middle man and encourage you to figure out what’s right for yourself without having to rely on contradicting, distracting commandments?
  
  4. The Bible says the highest virtue is faith.
  
  If you know your Bible versus you should be arguing that 1 Corinthians 13 says, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love..” But John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.” So the way to get to Heaven and survive death is to have faith. That’s what life and death is judged by. That’s the test. That’s the meaning of life.
  
  If the most important thing is to have faith then everything else is ultimately irrelevant. You can beat and rape your children, cheat your neighbor, lie, steal, and anything else. When it comes time to make those hard moral decisions you know that if you backslide a little (or even a lot) you can always ask for forgiveness later, and as long as you have faith your sins will be forgiven and you can get away with a lifetime of hurting yourself and other people.
  
  Furthermore, when the emphasis of ethics is taken off of actions and focused on beliefs it cripples your ability to weigh the value of your actions. A real system of ethics, like the one the court of law uses focuses where it should be, on actions that matter, actions that hurt/help people.
  
  Another problem with faith is that it’s the opposite of reason. If you have unyielding faith in the “alpha and the omega” God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, and you have faith in God’s word then what else is there? God is everything, and God’s word is everything. Logic would tell you that you don’t need anything else. But in reality you do need something else. You need a lot more. You need knowledge. You need introspection. You need growth. You need reason. You need money. You need to be selfish sometimes. You need comfort. You need to fulfill your wants. You need self-actualization.
  
  Faith doesn’t fulfill everything. Faith eliminates everything. Faith yields an empty, ignorant shell of a human. Go to any prison and interview the worst of the worst criminals, and I guarantee the common traits you’ll find among every immoral person is ignorance and an inability to reason. And that’s exactly the kind of person the Bible commands you to be.
  
  3. The Bible says “good” people are scum.
  
  This is slightly different than the first point that says sinners are scum. While sinners are the worst scum, everybody is still scum. “All our righteousness is like filthy rags.” Isa 64:4.
  
  The basis of any reason-based moral code is the value of life. State laws don’t forbid the mistreatment of rocks because rocks have no value. State laws don’t give trees personal rights because they have no value as an independent-minded life. State laws give animals some rights because they’re living, cognizant beings, but the law doesn’t value their lives as much as humans. So it doesn’t give them as much rights as humans. In times and places where slavery was legal it was considered a fact that slaves didn’t have the same value as non-slaves and could thus be treated in a way that would be considered unethical to treat a non-slave. Well the Bible places the value of human life at filthy rags and worse. We’re all sinners who deserve to be punished for eternity. When that’s the basis of your moral code it’s inevitable that you’re going to end up hurting yourself and others. It practically obligates you to hurt yourself and others.
  
  Even if you pick and choose the parts of the Bible you follow and devote yourself to “loving” other people, you’re probably going to end up hating yourself and punishing yourself for being human. The Bible makes no mention of the fact that hating/hurting yourself is morally equivalent to hating/hurting other people. So the Bible will almost certainly drive you to immorality in as far as you mistreat and deny yourself.A perfect example is Mother Theresa. Yes, she helped a lot of people, but intertwined with her devotion to helping others was devotion to endure personal suffering. Her own life was a celebration of agony. The Bible took a kind hearted woman who was willing to sacrifice everything to help others and made her hate joy and comfort.
  
  Actually, that’s a generous remembrance of Mother Theresa. Many people, even the aid workers who worked with her, remember her as a person who valued the suffering of others. She was quoted as saying, “Today the passion of Christ is being relived in the lives of those who suffer. Suffering is not a punishment. God does not punish.” and “ “I was talking to our lepers and telling them that leprosy is a gift from God, that God can trust them so much that he gives them this terrible suffering.”
  
  These are not the words of a sane person. These are the words of a person whose mind has been tragically disfigured. The reality of human psychology is that we tend to treat others the same way we treat themselves. So if someone or some book teaches you to hate yourself and hurt yourself you’ll tend to hate and hurt other people. That’s the stage that the Bible sets for us.
  
  2.The Bible tells you to give money to God.
  
  Let’s pretend that there aren’t hundreds of passages in the Bible directly commanding and encouraging you to give money to God. Even without that, God still created you. Therefore, you owe everything to God. Plus, the only way to survive death is to please God. So the more you give to God the better off you are. So logical would tell you to give as much money as possible to God.
  
  The problem with this is that there’s a correlation between financial stability and crime. Being poor doesn’t cause you to be a criminal, but poverty makes crime more rewarding and eliminates many support structures that would prevent you from resorting to crime.
  
  If you don’t have money then you can’t afford an education. You can’t afford to start a business. You can’t afford to survive. This sets you up to be an ignorant, suffering, desperate person. This sets you up to take desperate and illogical measures to survive. This sets you up to be a criminal. Just look at how many violent gangsta rappers give shout-outs to God. Have you ever wondered how such violent, ignorant people could have faith in God and be too stupid to see the irony? That’s because that ironic contradiction is inevitable when you’re following a moral guide as faulty as the Bible.
  
  Furthermore, the more money the family you’re born into has, the more money they’ll be able to devote to your education and setting you up in life. The better you can be set up in life the less likely you’ll be to have to resort to hurting other people to survive. Yet when a family has been devout Christians for generations upon generations the amount of money they’ll have given to the church that could have been spent building personal wealth will be compounded. Thus, their loss is compounded, and the chances of raising a miserable, ignorant desperate child who is likely to become a criminal is compounded.
  
  To this you might argue, but the church does help people. True, but if everyone for the past 2000 years had been allowed to help themselves then they wouldn’t need help from the church. Plus, it’s obvious that the church helps itself more than the it helps others. Look at the cathedrals and opulent churches all over the world that have been built instead of building schools and half-way homes. Plus, the church spends a great deal of its time and money spreading the word of God: the word that makes people hate themselves and give up their financial security for a dream that’s never going to pay out.
  
  If all the money that the church swindled out of people over the past 2000 years had been spent solely on schools or technological research the world would be within walking distance to utopia.
  
  1. The Bible doesn’t offer any clear moral guidance.
  
  This has been the theme of most of this blog. So this point pretty much goes without saying. However, it’s important enough that it needs to be stated clearly.
  
  At no point in the Bible is there a coherent, systematic break down of morality. The 10 Commandments is the closest it gets, and even those (on a whole) do more damage than good, and the rest of the commandments following those 10 are maniacal and contradict other commandments elsewhere in the Bible.
  
  Using the Bible as a moral code will leave you confused, self-loathing, illogical and fanatical. There’s a reason the Bible isn’t used as the state code of law anymore That was tried, and it led to hundreds of years of oppression and misery culminating in the Inquisition. That wasn’t an accident, an anomaly or the fault of a less-evolved, less-knowledgeable culture. That’s the path the Bible leads to. If you follow the Bible you will become an immoral person. Period.
  
  To this you might argue, “I know lots of Christians who are the nicest people you’ve ever met.”
  
  That’s because they’re not following the Bible. They’re following an idealized version of their culture’s values and projecting that into the Bible, not the other way around.

7 Ways the Bible Will Make You an Immoral Person by The Wise Sloth — http://wisesloth.wordpress.com/2010/05/ ... al-person/

[Dardedar]

Kind of like our tract:

***
Why your morals are better than the Bible’s

1. The Bible condones slavery.
Although supposedly a book of morals it never says anything against slavery. Yahweh instituted slavery at Exod. 21:2. Leviticus 25:44 explains where to get slaves and that you can hand them down to your children. Exod. 21:21 allows a slave owner to beat a slave to death, as long as it is an unintentional result of the severe beating. Ephesians 6:5 has: "Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ." Colossians 3:22 says: "Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it,… with sincerity of heart and reverence for the LORD."

2. The Bible supports polygamy.
Yahweh gave David many wives and would have given him more: "Thus says the LORD,... I gave you your master's house, and your master’s wives… if this were too little, I would add to you as much more." (2 Sam 12:7-8). His son Solomon is the only person in the Bible specifically described as being loved by Yahweh. He had 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3).

3. The Bible has condoned and even required human sacrifice.
…and they hanged them in the hill before the LORD: and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest… And after that God was intreated for the land. (2 Sam. 21:1-14; see also Exod. 22:29-30; Lev. 27:28-29; Ezek. 20:24-26)

4. The Bible has supported mass genocide.
So Joshua… utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded. (Joshua 10:40)

…do not leave alive anything that breathes. (Deut. 20:16)

…Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys. (1 Samuel 15:3)

5. The Bible teaches that women have an inferior status to men.

Wives be in subjection to your own husbands, as unto the LORD,… as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives also be to their husbands in everything. (Ephesians 5:22-24)

6. The Bible says a woman must marry her rapist.

…she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her… (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)