Question #1: Can we teach morals without religious texts?
Question #2: If not, which religious texts contain authoritative morals?
Question #3: If one text was chosen, to what extent should it affect the law?
Question #4: If so, what is our public morality based on?
2 comments:
Greg,
I hate to be the guy that presents a question to a question, but if we teach morals in the public square (in the state arena) whether we explicitly use scripture or not, are we not using divine authority already? I believe scripture teaches us (Rom 1) that we can reason scriptural moral authority through general revelation. I believe one of our ultimate goals would be to bring others to the divine revelation of scripture, but to reason in the court room or in the senate we do not have to reveal that our source comes from scripture in order to give it a weighty authority to those who are lost. For example many people who are lost still believe that murder is wrong. I think one question Christians should ask is will we continue stand and say such things as murder is wrong. An example of a failure to do so is abortion. When the abortion issue was first presented to the American Christians little action was taken. If I am not mistaken it was not until the early 1990's that a strong out cry was even audible. If past missionaries to foreign lands could reason with pagans to stop widow burning I believe there is still hope for Christians to be a voice against such evils as abortion.
I hope I have not strayed too far from the question, but in essence I am saying the atheist will always use his world view in making moral choices and arguments and likewise so should the Christian. Especially when our world view is based on scripture alone.
Gary,
Well said. I once tried to persuade a man who was living out of wed-lock with his girlfriend that this was wrong. I did not do so using explicit argument from my religious perspective. He told me months later that he had decided to get married. I thought then that that which makes a society more just includes promoting righteousness partly for its own sake (of course while never personally seeing such promotion as the end of all the righteousness possible in the interaction).
I later began to extend this argument to my own field of study in my BA, English. I began to realize that the reason that the traditional canon of Literature had been under such attack was because a large number of people who held different views of the canon had sat on the boards of colleges, publishing houses, etc. These people rose within the system, gathered their followers, and voted to "diversify" the canon and put forward literature of less quality in favor of Shakespeare or other classics. The only way to reverse such a process would be for a significant number of people to penetrate the decision-making process of the college system and reinstate that which has been valuable for many generations.
I suppose it was at this point, back then, that I began to reason as to the basis of promotion of righteous/goodness/truth/beauty/etc. in different walks of society and how that basis/motive interacts with a state system that separates religion (a key component of many people's morality) from legislation.
Thanks for your post.
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