Cindy, this started from your statement:

Everyone in the world bases moral judgments on beliefs about the supernatural

I don't think anyone interpreted that as a value judgment, but a fair number of people objected to its accuracy as a blanket statemtent about human nature.

Where I thought we started was with the suggestion that the belief (or not) in the supernatural was the basis of one's moral beliefs, and a lot of people were arguing that. I didn't get the sense that people were saying that it was a bad thing one way or the other, just that what was presented as universal was not actually so.

What Brenda Said.

brenda, you maybe just missed the beginning. We were talking about the Afghani who was under a death sentence for his conversion to Christianity, 15-20 years ago--the one who just got asylum in Italy.

Someone said commented about the problem of using Sharia law as the law of the land. Then, Rick said:

Agreed. But I think that it also illustrates the general problem of basing moral judgments on beliefs about the supernatural. That happens in this country too.

In my first response, I was way overly-simplistic, because I said:

Everyone in the world bases moral judgments on beliefs about the supernatural (because beliefs about the supernatural include those who believe nature is the only reality--that is, that there is no supernatural). The problem is more about basing legal judgments on beliefs about the supernatural, and trying to regulate thought and expression--in this case, those thoughts are opinions on the supernatural.

I then got way less simplistic over the course of the conversation yesterday and today, to better explain what I meant, which is that I don't think you can divorce one part of your world view from another. I think if someone renders a particular moral judgment, if you pick at his reasoning, eventually, you're going to start discovering his world view.

There was a Daily Show guest recently who was a fundie, and was studying translations of the bible, and then became an agnostic when he discovered how completely different some copies were from others. Like a massive game of Telephone resulting in what we have today.

Like, Jesus would say, "pass the matzo ball soup" and that would translate into, "Fuck da Caesar."

I wanted to pick up the book, but now can't remember the title or author, and the Daily Show site is giving me no love.

Plus, I brought apples and croissants and brie for breakfast

I'm now officially dying for a hot ham & brie croissant. With an apple.

One of the things that I admire about the Bible is the fact that you only have to read a few pages before you find out whether you are cut out for a Biblical religion. There is no attempt to be vague about the issues or to keep you in suspense. Right there at the beginning, a disembodied voice calls down to Abraham and says, ‘I am God, and I demand that you kill your son.” Now, a person could respond in several ways to this demand:

If you, like Abraham, would answer “Yes, I’ll kill my son for you because you are God and I know that the highest good is to follow your will,” then you probably will make a good Jew, Christian, or Muslim.

If you would say “Killing my son goes against all that I know about morality, so in the absence of clear evidence that there is a God and that this God has the highest moral authority in this situation, I must refuse,” then you probably would make a good agnostic.

If you would say “There is no God, and only some kind of sick bastard would be telling me to kill my son,” then you probably would make a good atheist.

You get to make your choice right at the beginning. Is right and wrong determined by this supernatural God’s will (or, in reality, by stories that purport to reveal the supernatural God’s will) or is right and wrong determined by reason and experience and consequences that we can observe in the natural world in which we live? It’s a powerful, elegant, and clear dilemma that tells you where you stand before you even finish the book of Genesis.

Allyson, I'm pretty sure it was Misquoting Jesus.

There was a Daily Show guest recently who was a fundie, and was studying translations of the bible, and then became an agnostic when he discovered how completely different some copies were from others. Like a massive game of Telephone resulting in what we have today.

And that's just the mistranslations (thank you, King James I). I'd love to find the bits they left out for "editorial" reasons, if I could read Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew, that is.

I wanted to pick up the book, but now can't remember the title or author, and the Daily Show site is giving me no love.

Allyson, it's Misquoting Jesus--I only remember that because Connie Neil mentioned it a few weeks before the TDS appearance.

Don't forget the stuff that was added by later scribes, including the end of Mark (the original ended with the discovery of the empty tomb, and the phrase "And they were afraid," which was too much of a bummer for later Christian scribes, so they added the Resurrected Jesus as seen in Luke and Matthew to make it a matched set).

what I meant, which is that I don't think you can divorce one part of your world view from another.

That's a complete 180 from the statement you began with, which is probably why I didn't pick it up from anything else you've posted until now. You started with causality, but the above suggests you meant correlativity.