Bottle wrote:Sdaeriji wrote:I don't understand why using the Bible for moral guidance has to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Yes, I get my morals from the Bible. I don't get ALL my morals from the Bible, and I don't take ALL of the morals from the Bible either. I do not understand the insistance that, for example, if I believe that the parable of the Good Samaritan is a good moral guideline, then I must also accept all of the unsavory and anachronistic morals demanded by Leviticus.
Sounds like you don't get your morals from the Bible at all. You pick and choose which parts of the Bible you're going to use as a blueprint based on...your values. Your moral sense. Your conscience. Your reason.
You get your morals from the same place as everybody else: from a combination of the culture in which you were raised, the values you were taught as you grew, and your own experiences and reason combining to create your own individual moral judgment.
So he externalizes. So the language of the Bible clicks with him in such a way that it allows his conscious mind to formulate and hold consciously concepts that otherwise he would merely feel as impulses and not be able to express and explore intellectually. I do not think it is at all incorrect to describe that kind of processing as "I get (some of) my morals from the Bible."
Other people "get their morals from" other sources, or other mixes of sources, but to my mind, it amounts to the same thing. None of the sources are the SOURCE of morality. They are the expression of morality which, itself, arises out of the self + the group.
That's how I see it.