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.

I think one true test of whether your religion informs your morals, or vice versa, is whether you would behave in a way that's contrary to your morals if dictated by your religion.

Don't you think most people behave in ways contrary to their own (professed, at least) morals at least once in a while, though--sometimes because of weakness or fear, or an impossible situation, or because a situation arises in which two principles are seemingly in conflict with one another? Doesn't that say more about character than about which informs what.

That's a fair argument, but I would modify my previous statement with how you feel you should behave when your morals and religion conflict, not how you actually would behave. IOW, which do you feel should trump the other. For example, imagine you are a devout Muslim of a sect or following that believes that apostacy should be punished by death. OTOH, you feel that freedom of religion/beliefs is a basic human right and killing someone for rejecting Islam is against your morals. You are Hamid Karzai. Or a prominent cleric. Or the executioner. What do you do? If you say, obviously you don't kill him, then your morals trump your devotion to your religion. If you don't know which should trump, then you're in the middle group where some of your morals are separate from your religion.

For example, say a crazed (but dumb) child murderer shows up at my door, and says, "Are your children home? If you say they're home, I'm going to enter your home and kill them." Now, I still think truth is good, and lying bad. And in fact, given my particular religious beliefs, it may even be that I should answer truthfully or at least not answer and try to thwart the killer another way. But I'm on the spot, and I think my duty to protect my children's life is more important than being perfectly truthful, in this circumstance.

Here's where we disagree, at least semantically. I feel it is good to lie to protect your child's life. In fact, I feel you have a moral duty to lie, and it is in no way a conflict with the assertion that lying is bad. Another way to say it is, lying is bad unless it is serves a higher moral purpose in which case, lying is good.

Don't forget the stuff that was added by later scribes

I like the guy who just wrote a poem about his cat.

tommyrot wrote the Bible?