re: "The Southern Baptist Moral Meltdown" (The New York Times, May 27, 2022)
As usual, good people should be forgiven for drawing the obvious lesson from history that it is secular morals founded on reason and justice that push religiously inspired moral belief and behaviour to in fact become what is more truly moral.
Ancient texts might be a reliable guide to what our ancestors believed. They have never been a reliable to guide to reality or to good morals. How could they be? How could the piously inscribed prejudices of one group reflect more than the beliefs and habits of their authors and their society? It seems a tad arrogant to think that any one human being or group long ago got everything infallibly right for all time, either about the movements of the heavenly bodies or about how evolved creatures should best live here on Earth.
Is this latest episode, the sad story of the Southern Baptist Convention, any different to what has played out for millennia, at least since Plato had Socrates lucidly set forth the fatal flaw in the notion that morality could be god given? Let us not forget that it was the charge of corrupting the young by teaching them to think critically about religious beliefs that led the court of law in democratic Athens to have Socrates put to death at the behest of politicians playing to true believers who valued sacred dogma over reason and justice.
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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article.
It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/opinion/the-southern-baptist-sexual-abuse.html#commentsContainer&permid=118519071:118519071
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