[Golfingnut]

Originally Posted by eweissenbach

Morality came first and we tacked religion on to it.


This has really caused me to think, and conclude that it fits my view of religion. My OPINION is that the writers of the Old Testament, and probably other books that lay out the tenants of various religions, wrote about what they knew, and tried to lay out the proper ways to live according to their beliefs. For example, they did not know about most modern science, and antiquity, and evolution theory, was unknown to them, thus the world according to them began about 6000 years ago with fully developed humans created by God. I know it is heresy to many to question that the Bible was the inspired word of God, but I think the inspriration was from their (the scribes and priests who wrote the old testament) view of how moral persons should behave, and give them a rule book to follow. Obviously some of the rules about food in the OT have been proven to be unnecessary, but given the known "science" of the day it probably made sense for example. Stories were probably either made up or perhaps were passed down through their oral history, which made morality statements. Again as an example, the story of Noah and the Ark; The lesson being that if you are immoral, God is capable and willing to destroy everything on earth, but in order to sustain life, he will command one moral family to gather up a male and female of every species in order to perpetuate life. Logic tells me that this is impossible, but as a morality tale it makes the point. In other words, I think these books of the Old Testament were the Church leaders of the day way to get people to fall in line with their view of morality. Now, if everyone were moral and acted in a moral way, their would be no need of such a moral manual, but as we have seen, that is not the way the world works. Unfortunately many have used the Bible and other religious works, to justify or rationalize some of the most henious acts in history. This is all simply my personal opinion, and I realize that many would disagree, however I am a practicing Christian and believe in my imperfect understanding of Christian morality.

As perfect of an analysis as I have ever seen.