Morality in the Bible

According to Bible 

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Man has to obey God's  laws

The LORD your God commands you this day to follow these decrees and laws; carefully observe them with all your heart and with all your soul. You have declared this day that the LORD is your God and that you will walk in obedience to him, that you will keep his decrees, commands and laws—that you will listen to him.  Deuteronomy 26:16-17

Violating God's laws is a sin.  

Sin is nothing but violating God's law.  

In fact, if there is no law, there is no sin.

Breaking a law brings God's wrath.

Anyone who sins breaks God’s law. Yes, sinning is the same as living against God’s law. 1 John 3:4

because the law can only bring God’s anger on those who disobey it. But if there is no law, then there is nothing to disobey. . Romans 4:15

You might think I am saying that sin and the law are the same. That is not true. But the law was the only way I could learn what sin means. I would never have known it is wrong to want something that is not mine. But the law said, “You must not want what belongs to someone else.”  And sin found a way to use that command and make me want all kinds of things that weren’t mine. So sin came to me because of the command. But without the law, sin has no power.   Romans 7:7-8

In my mind I am happy with God’s law. But I see another law working in my body. That law makes war against the law that my mind accepts. That other law working in my body is the law of sin, and that law makes me its prisoner.  Romans 7:22-23

Punishment for Not Obeying God

"But if you don’t obey me and all my commands, bad things will happen to you. If you refuse to obey my laws and commands, you have broken my agreement. If you do that, I will cause terrible things to happen to you. I will cause you to have disease and fever. They will destroy your eyes and take away your life. You will not have success when you plant your seed. And your enemies will eat your crops. I will be against you, so your enemies will defeat you. These enemies will hate you and rule over you. You will run away even when no one is chasing you."  Leviticus 26:14-17

Let us look at the story in the Bible of Prophet Elijah and the 450 prophets of Baal   1 Kings 18

• Elijah's God was Yahweh.  Elijah is insistent that people of Israel quit believing in Baal and switch their belief to Yahweh once and for all.

• Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest

• Contest was to kill a bull, one for Baal another for Yahweh and invoke them to light fire for the sacrifice.  Which ever God lights the fire is the true God.

• Priests of Baal make sacrifices, even hurt themselves, to get Baal's attention.  Nothing happens after several hours.

• Elijah prepares his sacrifice.  He pours water on it three times, and prepares a moat to keep the water in.  This makes the offering difficult to set fire to.

• Elijah calls on Yahweh once.

• Yahweh sends fire which consumes the wet offering!

• The people recognize Yahweh as true God and bow down in prayer.

• Then Elijah says, “Get the prophets of Baal! Don’t let any of them escape!” So the people captured  all the prophets. Then Elijah leads them down to Kishon Creek and killed them all - all the 450 prophets of Baal.

Here is Prophet Elijah killing 450 prophets of Baal for believing in Baal instead of Yahweh.  (In case you are not familiar with the Bible, Prophet Elijah is one of the major Prophets mentioned alongside Moses and Jesus. Matthew 17:1-3)

What does Yahweh think of this mass murder?  

• As the Bible tells us later, Elijah goes to Heaven.  2 Kings 2:11

•  In other words, Elijah committed no sin in murdering 450 prophets of Baal.

• What is the justification?  

• One of the ten commandments that says "You shall have no other Gods before me." By violating that command of Yahweh, those prophets of Baal sinned.  

• For that sin, their punishment was death. 

• Yahweh does not seem to mind very much that Elijah chose to execute this punishment on his behalf.

Is morality just a violation of Yahweh's law?  

• It is one thing to say that the Universe is governed by God's laws.  It is entirely another to say that what is in the Bible is God's laws.  Given stories such as the above, can we accept that Biblical laws are God's absolute laws for all humanity?

•  Can you understand why it is offensive when I am told that it is immoral to harm me only because God, or in the Bible Yahweh, (allegedly) says so?   

• Can you see the danger in such a position where now we are giving the extreme power over humanity's fate to someone who claims to have in his hand the word of God?   

• Conversely, can you see why someone who claims to have the word of God in his hand want you to believe that morality is what God says it is?

Euthyphro Dilemma & Christian apologetics

The Euthyphro dilemma is the following:

Socrates asks Euthyphro "Do the Gods will something because it is good or is something good because gods will it?"

Stated differently "Is something moral because God say so or did God say something because it is moral?"  If God says something is moral only because it is moral by a standard independent of God then God has not say in what is moral.  If something is moral only because God said so, then it is a case of "might makes right" and independent of any standards (if God says murder or hatred or rape is OK, then is it?).  

Bertrand Russell formulated the problem this way in his polemic Why I Am Not a Christian:

If you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not good independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God.

Both these arguments are against those who believe that goodness and moral values are grounded by God.  Abrahamic faiths are explicit in this regard:

• Man has to obey God's  laws

The LORD your God commands you this day to follow these decrees and laws; carefully observe them with all your heart and with all your soul. You have declared this day that the LORD is your God and that you will walk in obedience to him, that you will keep his decrees, commands and laws—that you will listen to him.  Deuteronomy 26:16-17

• Violating God's laws is a sin.  
• Sin is nothing but violating God's law.  
• In fact, if there is no law, there is no sin.
• Breaking a law brings God's wrath.

Anyone who sins breaks God’s law. Yes, sinning is the same as living against God’s law. 1 John 3:4

because the law can only bring God’s anger on those who disobey it. But if there is no law, then there is nothing to disobey. . Romans 4:15

You might think I am saying that sin and the law are the same. That is not true. But the law was the only way I could learn what sin means. I would never have known it is wrong to want something that is not mine. But the law said, “You must not want what belongs to someone else.”  And sin found a way to use that command and make me want all kinds of things that weren’t mine. So sin came to me because of the command. But without the law, sin has no power.   Romans 7:7-8

In my mind I am happy with God’s law. But I see another law working in my body. That law makes war against the law that my mind accepts. That other law working in my body is the law of sin, and that law makes me its prisoner.  Romans 7:22-23 

Judeo-Christian belief is that morality has to be grounded by God (via his command).  Otherwise, morality goes into infinite regress and ends up in nihilism.  While it is possible to have some morals objectively without reliance on God, in the end, one cannot provide an ontological basis for morality without God.

Euthyphro's dilemma stands in opposition to this Judeo-Christian belief that morality has to be necessarily grounded by God's command.  Is something good because God wills it to be good or God wills good because it is already good i.e., God recognize good whose goodness is knowable by independent criteria and by recognizing the good God is merely reaffirming the good?

Now, any other stopping point based in some finite creature like humanity or rational consciousness or something like that seems arbitrary and one wonders why that is the stopping point.  To overcome this arbitrariness problem, one could offer a platonic abstract object called "the Good" that exists independently as the standard.  Plato proposed that transcendent concept as a solution to Euthyphro dilemma.  Plato had the right idea - that the "Good" has to be independent of the human conception of personal God (Greeks had such Gods during Plato's time) to avoid the dilemma.  However, there is still the ontological problem.  Can abstract objects be the source of moral value?  Is morality objective in the sense of being beyond humans and universal?

What if God willed rape or murder to be Good?  Would it be Good?  The idea that God's nature is goodness says not so.  William of Occam offers a voluntarist view which states that good is simply determined by God's fiat.  This aligns with the idea that goodness or morality is arbitrary as it is simply what is willed by God.  This is problematic to many because it gives the sense of "might is right".  William of Occam overcomes this by saying that God's judgment of good and bad is not arbitrary and it aligns with our own sense of good and bad.  We think along those lines simply because God has built that thinking in us.  Thus, we think of rape and murder as bad simply because God has willed them to be bad. The problem with this argument for the theist is that it makes their scriptures and religion non-essential for ethical living. Current theistic position moved away from this argument.  It says that the essential nature of goodness of God is that it makes it impossible for rape, murder, or hate to become good.  

Modern day Christian apologists (such as William Lane Craig) propose that goodness is nothing but God's nature.  Hence there is no possibility of conflict between God's decree and whether that decree is good.  God's very nature is the good.  In other words, God's nature defines or determines what goodness is.  By God's nature, we mean his essential properties.  Without God's nature as the standard of Goodness, one goes into an infinite regress.  The way to end the regress is to provide a stopping point or a standard of good whether it is theists or atheists.  Unless one is a moral nihilist, one cannot escape the need for such a standard.  If one is not a moral nihilist, then they believe that an objective standard of goodness exists and we have to ask where this standard originates from.  That is where the infinite regress arrives from.

Does the God of Judeo-Christian theism fit the bill where the finite Greek Gods failed?  

In the Judeo-Christian faith, Theonomy teaches what that rule is: God’s revealed laws in the Old Testament, which are absolute, immutable, objective, and universal. This means that every one of the 613 laws given to Moses and recorded in the Pentateuch remains binding on every human being and must be enacted into law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/613_commandments

If these commandments come from the Bible and Bible is the source of knowledge of God, surely the Biblical commandments have to the closest knowledge we have of the good nature of Judeau-Christian God.  Which of these 613 commandments are part of the definition of God's nature as goodness?  Why not all of them?  On what basis do Christians pick and choose from the 613?  Clearly, Christians are using an independent standard to pick and choose some and reject others.  There is an additional problem: Humans accept morals not explicitly mentioned in the Bible.  Where do these morals come from?  Are they arbitrary compared to morals explicitly specified in the Bible?  

Thus,  Bible as the sole source of morals faces two problems: (a) All morals in the Bible are not accepted by modern society;  Thus, there seems to be an independent standard that ultimately judges morals, whether those morals come from the Bible or not; (b) There are morals missing in the Bible.  Should one consider them arbitrary?

In the final analysis, it is not sufficient even to have a standard for moral behavior.  We also need a basis for moral obligation or moral duty.  An abstract Good does not lay any moral obligation or duty upon me.  Why should I align my life with this abstract object of Good?  Standing in contrast o this objective Good are moral vices or abstract Bad?  What is to keep me from aligning with these vices?  Thus Plato's idealism doesn't provide a basis for moral duty or obligation.  Bible seems to offer a reason for the obligation of moral duty - Surely, Biblical God's commands are a force with a threat of sin and punishment.  They are an obligation with a threat of punishment for non-compliance.  But can a threat be an independent standard for moral behavior?  How many Christians really accept and follow that?

Doctrines of Salvation vs. Doctrine of Karma

Doctrine of Karma is the Universal law of personal accountability. Christian doctrine of Original Sin and the Biblical concept of vicarious redemption are incompatible with the doctrine of Karma.

Rajiv Malhotra compares the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to bring salvation to all humanity from Original Sin, with the doctrine of Karma.

• Karma is not transmitted via biological reproduction: Adam and Eve committed Original Sin when they violated God's commands. As a result of their act, God cursed the entirety of mankind forever, i.e., Adam and Eve's children, grandchildren, and so forth, ad infinitum, were forever condemned by God. This is known to Christians as Eternal Damnation. However, the karma of Adam and Eve cannot be transmitted to their biological offspring, and Adam and Eve must pay for their karma in their own rebirths. A given person carries his/her own personal karma into his/her own next life, and one's karma does not get transmitted to one's biological children. I do not suffer from the karma of my parents nor do my children suffer from my karma.

• Karma is always finite and its phala (consequence or fruit) cannot be infinite: Regardless of how bad Adam and Eve's misdeed was it could not cause eternal phala, which is what Eternal Damnation is. Every karma is finite and its phala is finite, even if it lasts a million years.

• My Karma phala has to be borne by me:  Karma theory is about personal accountability. One has to face the consequences of one’s own karma.  There is no escape. I brought my past life's karma phala into this world and will take this life's karma phala into my next birth. Where is personal accountability if I can commit sin and have God shower his grace on me and remove the consequences?  What kind of fairness is there if God forgives a mass murderer by showering His grace on the murderer just because he accepts Jesus as his savior?

• Someone else cannot bear the consequences (phala) of my actions (karma):   Christianity says that it is not possible to overcome original sin through one’s own actions. God alone can bring salvation to humanity.  How exactly did God bring salvation to humanity? By sacrificing Jesus through crucifixion. It is barbaric to suggest that God forgives sins by sacrificing life of other animals or other human beings.  It is even more barbaric to suggest that the all powerful God needs the sacrifice of Jesus to remove sin.  Vicarious redemption (redemption of one’s sins by another) is not allowed in Karma theory. Sacrificing Jesus cannot bring salvation to others. 

• Effect (phala) cannot precede the cause (karma): Karma theory states that first the karma has to occur and only then can its consequences occur. Effect (phala) never precedes cause (karma). But Jesus is said to have suffered (the phala) 2,000 years in advance of our birth today, and his suffering was to redeem our karma of today. This implies that Jesus suffered in advance of our karma, but phala in advance of the karma is impossible. The claim seems to be that Jesus established a sort of 'phala bank' and deposited infinite amount of phala in advance, and all those who accept his offer may neutralize all their karmas by drawing against this 'phala bank' account. This is simply impossible in karma theory.

Christian Defenses:

Anselm of Canterbury's  (1033-1109) Satisfaction Theory:

Penal Substitution is the idea that Christ bore the penalty for sin, in place of sinners. Penal substitution is a sinister and immoral idea that Christians for long have sought to offer alternative explanations.

Penal substitution was the prevailing understanding of Christians until Anselm suggested the workaround.  Anselm of Canterbury offers a nebulous explanation called the Satisfaction Theory.  Anselm regarded human sin as defrauding God of the honor he is due. Christ's death, the ultimate act of obedience, gives God great honor. As it was beyond the call of duty for Christ, it is more honor than he was obliged to give. Christ's surplus can therefore repay our deficit. Christ's death is still substitutionary but in a different sense than penalty: he pays the honor instead of us. But that substitution is not penal; his death pays our honor not our penalty.

Anslem believed that humans could not render to God more than what was due to him. The satisfaction due to God was greater than what all created beings are capable of doing, since they can only do what is already required of them. Therefore, God had to make satisfaction for himself. Yet if this satisfaction was going to avail for humans, it had to be made by a human. Therefore only a being that was both God and man could satisfy God and give him the honor that is due him.

[Comments:  Calling it penal substitution implies that God required sacrifice of Jesus in exchange for bringing salvation for humanity from Original Sin.  That is outright barbaric. Calling it satisfaction implies that Jesus sacrificed himself voluntarily.  This only makes God look a little less barbaric but the central problems are still in place.]

Protestant Reformers - Divine Justice Theory

Protestant reformers shifted the focus of Anselm's satisfaction theory from divine offense to divine justice. God's righteousness demands punishment for human sin. God in his grace both exacts punishment and supplies the one to bear it.

For Anselm, Jesus obeyed where we humans should have obeyed.

For John Calvin, Jesus was punished where we humans should have been punished.

[Questions: Why would the omnipotent God make this sin hereditary, for all future generations of Adam and Eve, so that all humanity has to bear this?  Having made it unavoidable, why would God place an insurmountable burden of sin which was more than humans were capable of paying for? What is so graceful about a God who exacts punishment but then supplies someone to pay for that sin?  Is the loving God so egotistical that he demands payments for his honor?  Would the loving God accept the sacrifice of innocent Jesus to pay for humanity's inherited burden?  ]

Christian Dilemma: Final Comments

The Christian Dilemma is as follows:

As a righteous  judge, God willed something for the fallen human race that he could not possibly will in his role as  a loving father; and as a loving father, he willed something that he could not possibly will in his  role as a righteous judge.  As a righteous judge, he willed that justice should prevail; and since justice requires retribution for sin, he was quite prepared to punish sin— in hell, for example - without any regard for the sinner's own good. But as a loving father, he also wanted to forgive sin and to permit his loved ones to escape the terrible punishment they deserved on account of their sin.  Hence the strife within the heart of God, and hence the need for an atonement that  would appease the wrath of God— that is, satisfy his justice— and put an end to the strife.  Christ died not to effect a cure in us, but to put an end to a bad case of schizophrenia in the Father.

Christians Theologians explain that Christ died in order that God might be merciful to sinners without violating his own sense of justice.  

• Is God really so helpless?    

• If morality is nothing more than God's nature, then God in all his mercy could have forgiven Original Sin of humanity and spared the monstrous act of crucifixion of Jesus? 

• What sort of Justice is it where an innocent Jesus has to honor God by sacrificing himself for the dishonor done to God by someone else?   If God chose to forgive Humanity, Jesus would have been spared and no human would see an issue with it in terms of justice.  Why could not God?  

• Is justice then something immutable, hence given, even for Christian God?  Perhaps the Christian God should have looked into the doctrine of Karma for justice.  Humanity would have been spared from the consequences of sin committed by Adam and Eve.  Jesus would have been spared from vicariously redeeming humanity.  God would have been spared from the dilemma.