One of the funniest things I saw on Facebook was that the Bible was the third most popular book in the SMU network. More people have read Harry Potter and To Kill a Mockingbird, as these books are actually readable and I honestly doubt the people who list “The Bible” as their favorite book have read it cover to cover.
As it turns out, many atheists are atheists because they have read the Bible. The Bible is terrible in any sort of modern literary standard: The characters are all one dimensional, except for God who has a miraculous character shift (there is actually a specific reason for this); there is no plot; the diction is incredibly long winded; the themes are hackneyed, considering a lot of it is a plagiarism from another religion; many of the scientific claims aren’t accurate; the imagery is somewhat decent at times with only a few quotable lines; even the main character has a conflicting story.
What really irritates me and this whole hypocrisy is that a lot of times people claim they get their morality from the Bible, as if to say they didn’t know “thou shalt not kill” without having to read it in some arbitrary book. Of course they take this logic further and thus we end with the ridiculous aforementioned question: Where do atheists get their morality? This is usually stated as an ad hominem, implying that atheists have some arbitrary set of morals or worse, that atheists do not have morals.
What most people do not realize is that we do not have an original Bible that we copy with modern methods. We only have copies of original manuscripts and not even copies of the original, or copies of the copies, or even copies of the copies of the copies. These copies were not Xeroxed or even printed by any sort of mechanical means. They were hand copied by scribes, one word at a time. This of course yielded many errors, especially since they were copied over and over. The process goes something like this: If you wanted something copied, you would go to a scribe, someone who was literate (which in the ancient world meant that you could sign your name), and have him copy it. Of course these people weren’t exactly extensively trained and their abilities were dubious at best, especially in the case of early Christian texts. In the first two or three centuries when Christianity was congealing, “educated” members of the congregation who could do the job and were willing did most of the copying.
If human fallibility wasn’t bad enough, people who would copy those copies would copy those mistakes and as these things go, the more times it gets copied, the more authoritative it seems, simply by the number of copies there are. Sometimes scribes found a passage where they assumed the copy had an error and tried to correct it and thus causing three different manuscripts: the original, the copy, and the mistakenly corrected copy. Over time, these errors would obviously accumulate. There were no copyright laws and in a lot of cases the originals weren’t available so scribes could change the original by copying it with new additions, which of course would change the author’s original meaning. Although the earliest manuscripts we have are written in Greek, there are a lot of manuscripts in different languages and so there are also translation errors. To give you a scale of how many copy errors there are in the Bible, John Mill, using only approximately 100 Greek manuscripts, published his findings, which isolated some 30,000 places where there were variations between the different manuscripts in 1550, and he only included the changes that he thought were significant. Now we have more than 5,700 manuscripts with the number of variations ranging from 200,000 to 400,000 plus. As Bart Ehrman put it in his book, Misquoting Jesus, “There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.”
During the first few centuries of the early church, there were many different sects that opposed each other on very fundamental levels. The variations between the different sects of modern Christianity would seem trivial to those in the early church. There was no “New Testament” at the time where people could point and say, “You are wrong.” For instance, there were Christian sects who believed that there were two separate gods; The New Testament God and the Old Testament God. Some sects believed that God created the Earth while others believed that the Earth was a cosmic disaster. Some of these groups insisted that Jesus Christ was both human and divine, while others argued that Jesus Christ was only human or only divine. There were even divisions between Jesus being both divine and human, as there were arguments whether Jesus was separately divine and separately human, or if he was simultaneously divine and human. I guess this omnipotent God couldn’t miraculously preserve His words.
It shouldn’t be any surprise Jesus had so many seemingly pagan motifs. The trinity does seem like a shoddy cover up of a religion with polytheistic roots. The Jesus myth takes a lot of themes from Greek and Egyptian mythology. Virgin birth stories and resurrection themes weren’t exactly uncommon at the time, not to mention that messiah stories were everywhere. In fact, Apollonius of Tyana, Horus, Mithra and a whole host of Gods and prophets predate the Jesus myth, with many striking resemblances like born on Dec. 25th, could heal the sick, and resurrected.
To those who actually say that they get their morality from the Bible, please read it. Read about the plagues, how Jesus came to bring the sword and not peace, how human sacrifice is both righteous and necessary, and the rest of the garbage that people conveniently overlook or say that it needs to be interpreted while professing that the Bible is the literal word of God. Oh and if you are confused of how to treat atheists, read 2 Corinthians 6:14, for what communion hath light with darkness?
In any case, the simple answer is that atheists get their morals from where everybody else gets them: through our family, friends, social constructs, philosophy, etc. There isn’t any mystery to it and it’s not like we grow up in a vacuum, with no influences to tell us what is right and wrong. Actually, it turns out with modern research that altruistic behaviors tend to be more favorable in communal species and so we even have evolutionary grounds for being moral.
Ken Ueda is a senior math, physics and philosophy triple major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
