Fundamentalism's Moral Paradox:

This post was inspired by reflecting on this passage of the Bible: Deuteronomy 22:20. The context is a man questioning his betrothed's "chastity" and what to do about it.

"But if this thing be true [that she's not a virgin] and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Is-ra-el, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you."

If the concept of evil does objectively exist, what God was commanding to be done to the woman certainly qualifies as unjust, wrong, and pure evil.

When we see the Islamic world doing these very things, we rightly recoil in horror. And by the way, many of the bloodthirsty and horrific things that the Islamo-fascists do to their own people -- especially their women -- come right from the pages of the Old Testament. Indeed (and ironic) that the terrible persecution directed against Christians in Islamic nations is because, Christians by worshipping a "God" named Jesus (along with two other Gods) are committing the crime of "polytheism" and Islamic fundamentalists accurately note that the Old Testament treats polytheism as the most serious of crimes and demands the immediate execution of those who would tempt the community to worship "false gods."

Now, is there a way to defend the Bible so that we don't just throw the book out entirely because certain sections of it are brutal, barbaric and flat out immoral? Yes. And here is how I would do it:

The Bible, especially the Old Testament, was written a long, long time ago. Humans came from a "state of nature" (our evolutionary state) that looked not like Locke's "hypothetical" description of it, but rather like Hobbes's "state of war" where men warred against one another and where "might made right."

Civilization brought us out of this brutal state and the Ancient Jews, as described in the Old Testament, were taking that "first step" from this sub-barbaric evolutionary state towards civilization. And as bad as some of those Old Testament verses seem, the Ancient Jews were probably no worse and indeed probably slightly more civilized than all of the other Pagan tribes (especially the enemies of the Jews: The Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, etc.).

In terms of doing wrong, you have to know something is wrong before you can rightly be held culpable for it. When we emerged from our evolutionary state, we weren't given a handbook entitled "Civilization 101" where we were informed of everything we needed to know about 20th Century humane ethics. No rather we had to learn by experience. And it literally took thousands of years of accumulated experience for us to learn and develop the ethical system that we now have that rightly makes us shriek at the thought of taking a "betrothed" woman, having the government, at the behest of her husband, pull her pants down to examine her for evidence of "virginity" and then brutally stoning her to death if she is found not to be a virgin.

Slavery is a good example: As "self-evidently" inhumane and wrong as it seems to us now, the institution was practiced universally for thousands of years without controversy because no one realized it was wrong. The Bible certainly doesn't proscribe it. Neither does the Koran. Neither did the ethical teachings of the Ancient Greeks or any other Pagan culture. We had to "learn" that it was wrong through experience. And from my understanding of history, Western Culture in the 1600s AD first began to question the morality of slavery. (At least that's when the dismantling of the institution of slavery began.)

If a proscription against slavery were written right in the pages of the Bible as clearly as the proscription on murder, theft, idolatry, worshipping false gods, or even homosexual conduct, then the West would have banned slavery right from the start instead of the middle of the 19th Century AD (when the dismantling of the institution of slavery ended in the West.)

It's clear that Alan Dershowitz is right when he says "we can do much better than the Ten Commandments." What are we to think of a code that outlaws "coveting" but doesn't even give us a hint that slavery is wrong?

The bottom line is the Ten Commandments and the rest of what's written in the Bible are defensible if and only if put into historical context. In other words, one must read the Bible through the lens of historical relativism (and "situational ethics") and context in order to see it as a "Good Book," one which guided man on the path towards civilization.

The problem for the fundamentalists is that they reject (or at least, they claim to) historical relativism and situational ethics in general and especially as applied to their Bible. To them, EVERYTHING that is written in the Bible is absolute, inerrant, and timeless, as true now as it was when written.

But, as I have demonstrated, according to our 20th Century view of ethics -- of "human rights" that views slavery as wrong, treats women as equals, demands that government respect the basic privacy and dignity rights of its citizens -- certain things written in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, but some of the New as well are morally indefensible.

It is morally indefensible for any government to not only execute, but execute by taking stones and smashing skulls of homosexuals, recalcitrant children, those who worship false Gods (like Hindus and Hare Krishnas, perhaps even Muslims if Allah is not the God of the Hebrew Scriptures) and betrothed females who aren't virgins, and many others. And it is likewise morally indefensible to allow slavery, which the Bible clearly does.

That right there is good reason, to me, to reject the inerrancy and absolutism of Scripture. This problem is easily solved for those of us who wish to laud the Bible as a piece of literature and an important historical document by accepting that it was written by men living in brutal times before we knew better, and that it is often wrong. But the fundamentalist can't do that. And therein lies his moral paradox.