The last book

I took the risky move of borrowing a sci-fi film that I didn't know anything about. I did this mainly because it had Denzel Washington in it and I generally like his work. The movie was a bit of a surprise in that it had a good bit of philosophical interest for me. This is not to say that I will watch with my children or parents. It is not that kind of movie, but it is one that raises an interesting question of what the end of our society could be.

The story occurs thirty year after a war basically destroys the world with very little food for a still very populated planet. Some people resort to cannibalism while others resort to other methods of survival. The camera follows one Eli who seems to be a superman type of character with a few interesting.flaws and scruples. As the story moves on we find that most people in the world are illiterate and destroyed all the Bibles they could find attributing the war to the followers of the book. Eli is lead by "a voice" to the last Bible and carries it on a 30 year pilgrimage to safety. Don't worry I didn't ruin the movie for anyone still wanting to watch it, though I will admit that it is not all that great outside some of its cerebral interests.

What would the world look like without the Bible? In the movie and in the minds of many people that argue for Biblical morality the world would be a lawless and destructive place without the moral guidance of the Holy Scriptures to guide us. In fact I must disagree for three reasons.

1. Christians don't even follow scripture as a moral guide. Ask most Christians about their guiding Scriptural passages and you will get some innocuous verses or phrases they learned in elementary Sunday School mixed with some concepts they picked up from some popular speaker or writer. Ask any Christian on the street and you will find that they can barely make their way through a Bible much less relate the basic message in each book of the Bible. I can assure you that almost none have read the Bible from cover to cover. So what do Christians find as a moral compass? They use their culture, though not necessarily their secular culture. The leaders of various evangelical factions hold a cultural sway strong enough that churches and political groups can count on them to vote their way in most elections. James Dobson, James Kennedy, and even the Mormon Glenn Beck can be included in this influential group although there are others with slightly less influence in the Southern Baptist Convention, and Bob Jones University. That a Mormon can lead Evangelicals is a sign that theology is not a necessary prerequisite. Most American Christians follow their herd instincts to do whatever their Christian friends and leaders do.

2. History teaches us that Scripture is not a very strong moral guide. The situation presented in the movie is actually a rough representation of what happened after the fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Catholic Church held the Scripture in high regard, but did not develop a strong moral or legal code from Scripture. In fact the Greek and Roman philosophers were the moral compass to which Scripture was adapted. Interestingly even our American Founding Fathers followed the Roman and Greek guides along with some Native American examples as practical helps in developing our country with Biblical adaptations that probably added legitimacy to their work.

3. This reason is the most compelling of all- There is not a single moral code in Scripture. My favorite example is that of the value of human life. Modern Christians hold that all human life is sacred, but that standard is not widely applied in Scripture. Jesus comes the closest to holding this standard. Modern Christians would do well to follow the moral guidance of Jesus, but then their theologic standard may be problematic.
While Jesus clearly stated that He did not come to destroy the Law He did cast doubt on its practical value. Even in the Old Testament not all rules were applied consistently with God arbitrarily guiding His people in various actions that contradicted His supposed law. For example, modern Christians would dismiss the command to sacrifice a child for God as a command from a demon and not God, and yet Abraham was congratulated for bringing his son to the altar. Several times throughout the Bible the authors congratulate the heroes for their situational ethics as a deeper understanding of God's implied law.

Not only are American Christians not following the moral law of the Bible they are probably making the better choice. I just hope they someday realize it and stop following all the evangelical fads they seem to love so much. It would hurt if we all actually thought for ourselves.

Is Murder Justified?

I follow a number of blogs for personal growth and education. Among these blogs are some that focus on science, religion, and theology from different perspectives. One blog I like is entirely for fun. It is the blog of a philosophy professor who designs online questionnaires that act as philosophy experiments. The most recent addition to his series is a set of questions answering the above question. While philosophy tends to deal in hypothetical questions, especially as related to questions of morality, this set of questions mostly relate to true situations and how the reader responds to them. Jeremy Stangroom chose as one of his questions the scenario of Richard Parker who was killed by his shipmates after they found themselves shipwrecked and starving in a lifeboat. Richard Parker was chosen to be killed to sustain the lives of the other men because he did not have a wife and children depending on him, and it seemed that he was on the verge of dying anyway. Later investigators agreed that the men would have died had they not eaten the body of Richard, but they were convicted of murder even though the murder was the only choice possible to save the lives of several men.

One of the interesting questions that this raises is what would be the Biblical response to this situation? American Christians would state that every life is precious which is why they tend to dislike abortion and euthanasia, and so they would tend to feel that one life is too precious a cost for the attempt at saving two or more other lives. Of course this instinctive response is not necessarily Biblical. Based on the math present in the many Bible stories that deal with substitutionary death one life lost is a reasonable cost for the saving of many others. This is an issue at conflict with the American Evangelical aversion to abortion. God is certainly not "pro-life" in the Bible, and yet many Americans would still oppose abortion and the killing of Richard Parker as being against Scripture when their ethics really are a product of their culture and not the Bible.