Where is this moral intuition contained in those religions? Surely not in God’s actions, since he goes around killing infants and commanding their killing quite frequently. Is there some special commandment about baby-killing that I haven’t encountered? I’m not following your reasoning here.
There’s enough in the Bible to suit anyone’s notions, whether racist or anti-racist. You’re cherry-picking the parts you, for reasons independent of Christianity, approve of. Now, it seems that racism, per se, is a moderately recent, European invention. What the bible teaches is ethnicism. It’s similar, but the lumps are smaller.
They are perhaps not the same, but yes, you do seem to lack certain basic visceral moral impulses, based on what you’ve written. A good example of your lack of these moral impulses would be this:
That you regard the proposition of equality under the law as “frankly ludicrous” unless driven by a religious tenet from which it is a non sequitur suggests not only a lack of basic moral impulses but also a vacancy in terms of moral reasoning. So, yes, we do differ enormously in whether we feel these moral impulses deeply, and I’m glad you see that. It’s a step in the right direction.
Again, I don’t generally do “comparisons” in these things as there is no context in which they become important in moral reasoning. If by killing we are referring to murder in the conventional sense, I would regard both killings as wrong.
And, indeed, we do not. However, in the case of the person in the persistent vegetative state, we do recognize that such a person is no longer alive in any sense that anyone would consider meaningful. It is not a mere case of diminished capacity, so your “bizarre implication,” while bizarre, flows from your own failures of understanding rather than from the example; the bizarreness is all yours. When that person’s preferences, clearly expressed, were to die in such a circumstance, we of course recognize that there is only one decent thing to do and that that is to honor those wishes.
Indeed not, but you were invoking the god which was said to have directed that slaughter as the fount of all morality. If the Bible is untrustworthy, that’s fine (and certainly true), but that untrustworthiness extends to the bits you like, not just the bits you don’t.
Yeah, the Bible’s full of great stuff.
“And all the people answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’”
The difficulty is that since the Bible contains both racist and non-racist materials, there is enough there to account for a lot of “shared moral intuition,” including a good deal which is of a truly monstrous character. You don’t get morality from such a place; you can edit such a source in a way to construct a moral system, but it’s a matter of selecting the good and chucking out the bad.
You still have the awkward problem of Isaiah using We as referring to himself and others. Isaiah is a prophet and one of the people of 8th century BC Israel.
I think this is right. Standing alone Isaiah 53 would not convert someone. The messianic Jews are very knowledgeable about the Old Testament. The other versus in Isaiah along with the passages attributed to Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Micah, Moses, Malachi, Jeremiah, Daniel and David (psalms) support the Messianic king and suffering servant in Isaiah 53.
I agree but with the destruction of the second temple the sacrifice ritual was no longer available as in the original tradition. Jesus per Isaiah 53 "was taken like a lamb to slaughter " replaced the original Jewish tradition. God certainly came up with a better solution here
