Aside from the common factors I have already described, religions also feature dogmatic belief, which in some cases can be very strict. This is where the biggest problems lie—because these beliefs are not literally true, unless understood as a kind of mythic construct: not to be taken as history or physics, but as poetic narrative, figurative teaching, or a focus for moral reflection.
Some dogmatic beliefs may contain wise reflections about morality or justice. But when people treat dogma as literal fact—or as rigid moral law—it often leads to narrow or rigid moral reductionism. Furthermore, some particular religious stories, even if understood as metaphors, can be brutal and totally contradictory to other aspects of the religion’s doctrines, so it can be quite a stretch to find a plausible “beneficial” figurative interpretation.
One can often find, in the same religious text, stories or teachings that contradict each other—sometimes directly, sometimes in subtler ways. Because of this, many individuals end up “picking and choosing” passages to bolster a pre-existing stance on almost any subject. There is a name for this in religious studies—proof-texting—and it is one of the main ways dogma becomes both rigid in tone and flexible in application.
Many people feel that their guidance regarding “right and wrong”—their foundation of morality—comes from religion or religious texts. People may consider the Ten Commandments to be an obvious moral guide. Yet thinking about morality this way reminds me of the moral development of children. At an early stage, a child may feel morality is dictated by a rigid external rule: “don’t take that cookie,” or “you’ll be punished if you take that cookie.” In this stage, the “reason” not to take the cookie is not understanding, empathy, or principle, but obedience and fear of punishment. That may keep order, but it is a precarious foundation for morality.
It is morally superior—and practically necessary—for a person to reason about complex situations beyond simply following an external instruction or fearing punishment. Safety and success in life often depend on being able to think flexibly about moral issues, including resisting instructions from potentially malevolent or unreliable authority figures. Rule-following is not the same thing as conscience. (And in severe antisocial or psychopathic traits, the problem is often not a lack of knowing rules, but a shallowness in guilt, empathy, or concern—one more reason that rule-following alone is not enough.)
Imagine being with someone for whom the main reason they are not assaulting you or stealing from you is strict obedience to an external rule, a scripture passage, or fear of punishment—would you feel comfortable with this person’s character? Deep moral development—the kind most people would want for themselves and require in close relationships—involves reasoning about why an action is right or wrong, balancing desires with social consequences, short-term impulses with long-term outcomes, and recognizing that rare exceptions can exist (for example, stealing medicine to save a starving child). Humans are capable of this kind of moral reasoning irrespective of religious belief, and there are good reasons why it emerges naturally in social species and cooperative cultures.
I do have to acknowledge that some religious texts contain inspired statements about moral reasoning—for example, the Sermon on the Mount, with its emphasis on kindness, love, and humility. But many of these ideas are not unique to Christianity. Variations of the Golden Rule—the ethic of reciprocity—appear across many traditions: Confucian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and others. This is not evidence of divinity; it is what we would expect in human societies grappling with the same recurring problems of cooperation, conflict, and conscience.
The treatment of religious texts as perfect moral instruction manuals is problematic on many levels. Even within traditions that claim “inspiration,” it is hard to maintain that every specific word—let alone every translation choice or manuscript tradition—is a flawless, literal directive. Most people therefore focus on a higher level of organization: a verse (a numbered unit), which is the most common unit studied in sermons or religious meetings.
Many churches have a kind of “book club” format in which small groups meet in someone’s home—refreshments served—to discuss a particular passage, often guided by published interpretations consistent with the group’s existing style of thinking. Sometimes the analysis stops at the verse level, partly out of practicality. It is complicated to integrate a theme across an entire text like the Bible, with its many books, authors, genres, and historical layers. For each theme or figure of speech present in one verse, there may be dozens of resonant passages elsewhere, sometimes in widely disparate parts of the text, and contradictions—either direct or qualitative—are not difficult to find.
But, as with studying literature, it is a narrow way to understand a text to focus only on its most granular fragments. Much meaning in literature comes from a more holistic analysis: genre, context, narrative arc, tension, voice, contrast. Likewise, if you look at a photograph, it would not make sense to divide it into tiny sections and analyze each separately as though the whole image were nothing but a pile of fragments. It is often inconvenient to do holistic analysis in most sermons or study sessions, so many communities stop at the verse level—or at best, a short passage. And it matters that these verse divisions are themselves later editorial tools, not features of the earliest manuscripts.
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