This page: Just because parts of the Bible are untrue or results of error and human invention, does not mean that its stories have no worth as moral guidance. However frequently in addition to fallibility, the Bible presents immoral guidelines. This page is a summary of some of the myths, stories or events in the Bible which present anti social or immoral ethics.
Christian Moral Theory:
Biblical Specifics of Christian Morals:
Christian Morality in Action:
The Bible as moral book
The bible is a large text, but not as large as (for example) Tolkien's Lord of The Rings. Looking for morals in Lord of The Rings I find many direct morals to learn. There are many stories of people, events and actions and from these in any book we can find morals. However the Lord of The Rings does not attempt to present itself as a book primarily concerned with morals:
All the same things and more can be said of the Bible. Principally the Bible does not set out to teach morals, it is a holy book, and aside a few generics such as "Love thy neighbour" there are very few direct moral teachings in the Christian bible.
Confusing and contradictory morals
There is not a single moral "absolute" that I cannot find a contradiction for in the very same book. For example, it is said by Bible believers that "Do not steal" is an absolute moral found in the Bible, yet in the Bible we also find text where, under direct orders from God, people have stolen.
Old biblical text is overwritten by the new, and a common Christian argument as to why they no longer follow the codes of the old testament is that they were designed for a different, nomadic culture. Likewise, it is easily seen that the new testament was clearly written for a roman and Jewish audience, so even parts of the New Testament (that override parts of the Hebrew scriptures) are ignored because it is not relevant to todays' culture.
The reading of morals from the Bibles involves in all cases a judgement of which morals you find most important - you have to choose which text is most important morally, at the expense of other contrary morals. In addition because of the volume of text, and its frequent obscurity, it is not only possible to use your imagination in order to arrive at any moral at all, but it is necessary to use it! Your subconscious imagination is given freedom, with the bible, to read into its obscurities all kinds of morals.
The Bible is required for moral thought
There are countless nations in history that existed before the Christian Bible was even heard of. For example, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Mongoloids,
Egyptians and Europeans survived a long time without the need for divinely inspired morality or the Christian Bible.
When the Bible finally did take hold in Europe, during and after the collapse of the Roman Empire, what happened to our moral system? The black spot in history known as The Age of Faith, or The Dark Ages, was the result of placing the Bible in the hands of the authorities. But that's besides the point.
There continue to exist many nations who are no less moral than any other nation, yet who have not had the Bible influence them. Japan is the most outstanding. China is the next. It can be seen that "the Bible is required for moral thought" is at best only true in some communities and at worst, not true at all. The Bible is just yet another large text from which people try to learn morals.
Morals and culture
Cultures carry morals with them, through the generations, with a function of change throughout each function caused by sociological, technological, political or other changes in the culture's environment. Culture and parenting are the strongest carrier of morals, and even a quick briefing of some of the more non-Western civilizations reveals morals that are alien to the Western world. From child sex and polygamy to cannibalism and genital sexual mutilation are all seen as not only acceptable, but necessary in some cultures. Some cultures see government tax as highly immoral because their cultures survive without need for people to give to a government system under threat of punishment.
All Human beings gravitate around certain morals. Some, such as incest avoidance, are a result of biochemistry and evolution rather than any moral decisions, while some have become so ingrained in society that some assume all cultures must also adhere to them.
As far as religious texts go, they have all been written within cultural contexts and at specific times, sometimes edited over a period of time (such as the Bible). In the latter case we end up with a text that was written during times when different morals were dominant amongst society. In short, the Bible represents not one set of morals but a whole sequence of books, written over a large time scale, and each one within different moral framesets and to an extent, different cultures altogether.
As more and more of the Bible's past is revealed people fall back to an argument that states that Christianity and its teachings uphold good morals. This page will examine those morals.
Interpretation of the Bible is always done within specific cultural contexts. As cultures change the way in which morality is perceived changes also. All cultures experience this temporal nature of morality, a gradual change in opinion over time. Each cultural frameset is liable to read morals into the largely amoral text of the Bible according to their perception of what morals are within their cultural context.
Because there is so much text, and most of it is not directly talking about morals, it is possible to construct any viewpoint you wish from the Bible. Reading up on slavery you can come to the conclusion that it is pro- or anti- , depending on what you personally believed in the first place. The same goes for all morals that people state are found in the Bible, there is endless disagreement because no-one interprets them in the same way, each reader brings his own prejudice in to it because he is limited to using his own brain to interpret the text.
The basic premise for predicting in what way a historical culture will interpret the Bible's text on controversial is what the culture accepts already, taking into account existing movements, and the examples given in this essay detail the main subjects.
As a society changes its moral views, its interpretation of Biblical texts changes with it. This much is common sense. But the force of that change is often within that society itself, with or without the Bible, and in the important areas above most frequently against established opinion of what the Bible traditionally is interpreted to say.
Moral changes in history have for the main part been established as movements by people who are not in contact with the Bible, and who have consistently had to struggle against the Bible's supporters in most historical cultural frames. The escapade of homosexuality and Women's Ordination (both are related to equality issues) still shows that Bible is yet again finding itself as a weight on society and moral thinking, a dogmatic relic, rather than at the forefront of morality. Biblical interpretation has lagged behind society, and the Church's moral teachings have had to follow society, rather than lead it, in diverse areas such as the abolition of slavery, birth control, women's rights, gay equality, individualism (i.e. sola scripture, decentralized church), race equality and religious freedom [Bryan 1966, p86].
The Churches have steadily become more like reflectors of the practice of the times, gradually and hesitatingly endorsing change. In the emphasis on 'getting up to date' the Churches tacitly recognize their own increasingly marginal capacity to influence society. The shifts of Church response on the issue of birth control illustrate the way in which moral theologians have attempted to come to terms with the changing moral practice of societies which they increasingly realize they know very little about. [...] By 1958, theologians had begun to accept the lead of social scientists. They refer to 'the quantity and complexity of sociological information', and [...] the Scriptures, revelation, papal and Episcopal pronouncements had ceased to be accepted, even by clerics, as adequately prepared guidance for society."Religion in Secular Society" by Bryan Wilson, p87-88
The Bible
There are a hundred quotes within the Bible that are immoral, including rape,
pillaging, all kinds of sexual violence, murder, stealing, parts that state you must hate your parents, kin, etc. There are tens of thousands of books and web pages that list these "household morals". But there are many who claim that these are irrelevant, because the Bible has been corrupted by Man. The Bible was never a single book, and has been altered, edited and changed many times even after the compendium of texts known as the New Testament was added to the Jewish Bible. Can it be said that the morals in the Bible, i.e., the main message, is enough to override the bad bits? Can we say that Christianity today upholds morals? This page will detail arguments that conclude no, the Christian teachings are immoral.
The search
It is not as easy as a layman would guess to find what the Christian morals actually are. There are so many contradictory statements and discredited parts of the Bible that it hard to decipher which bits are supposed to be valid or not.
There are dozens of pages, sometimes entire books, that do not describe or deal with morals at all, highlighting the "moralizing text" of the Bible yields less than a dozen pages of text even if we include the contradictions.
Some examples of amoral text: Chapters: Genesis 10, Judges 20, Matthew 1, the book of Revelation from Revelation 4 and onwards is pure fantasy.
The Christian Ethos
There are many different ways in which Christianity explains itself, and there is not a single description of their various faiths that all denominations would belief in. I will stick here to the more famous fables; the ones that are most likely to be taught in school.
Dangerous delusion
The most dangerous aspect of white light religion is the belief that if you think God wants you to do something, then it is for a greater moral good to go ahead and do it.
Saint Augustine's maxim, Dilige et quod vis fac - if you but love [God], you may do as you incline - is morally one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is pregnant, for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of conventional morality.
"The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James, p93
Madmen, political leaders and Christian militants have all justified their own violent actions under the belief that if they think God wants it, then they can therefore do it regardless of the cost to society. The Dark Ages, Europe's darkest centuries, were ravaged in ignorance and blood under this type of rule. It is dangerous indeed to assume that we know what God wants or that God's whims are moral.
The Christian mythology implies that the opposite is true. That no matter what happens, the child is a sinner and must repent. They must actively seek out advice and reflect on their inherent badness. They are influenced by Satan, they are imperfect and they are bound to hell unless they accept this.
It is immoral to tell people or imply that they are inherently a sinner. If we want people to do good they must know that they are not inherently bad, that they are capable of anything they put their minds to. Telling people that they are wholly dependant on a person far removed from our age and time for their salvation externalizes their own goodness, and creates a Christian guilt complex that can be hard to overcome.
If we externalized the things that make us good, if we are told we are influenced by Satan (an evil force), then our egos suffer, our confidence suffers and we end up feeling that we cannot do good off our own backs. It is better to say that "you are a good person, but everyone makes mistakes" and avoid the concept of "sin" judged by an ethereal spirit altogether.
"Once thou had passions and called them evil. Now hast thou only thy virtues? : They grew out of thy passions.
Thou didst set thy highest goal amidst these passions: thus became thy virtues and thy delights."Nietzsche, "Thus Spake Zarathustra" p28
Many of our good instincts come from things that from a 3rd person point of view appear to be bad. Trying to judge these things is wrong - everyone is motivated by things that are seen as good as well as bad, and trying to differentiate between them is unnatural and leads to instability and misguided behaviour.
Many say that the Adam and Eve story is sexist against females, i.e., portrays females under a negative light: As being weaker, less moral and trouble causers. However I will not present this argument as it really down to a matter of wording, and this page is dealing with the concepts, and not the details, of the Christian myths.
Morals of the story
Punishing one person for the actions of another is immoral. If we use the Adam and Eve story to explain evil, suffering and death then we are saying that God is immoral and not a forgiving God. Judging Adam and Eve even when they didn't know the difference between good and evil, when they didn't know it was wrong to disobey and couldn't understand that the serpent tricked them, is also immoral. The Adam and Eve story is not a suitable moral story for children nor is it a valid theodicy to explain evil."Adam and Eve" by Vexen Crabtree 2002 Sep 30
We will not look into the details of this story or into its plausibility. All that is dealt with on a previous page: Refuting The Nativity Story. Just because the story is false does not mean it is immoral. We start with Matthew, the first book of the New Testament. The only other book to include the birth narrative is Luke, but his version is wildly different to the one given in Matthew.
King Herod hears of Jesus' impending birth. He consults the three wise men and finds out where and when he is to be born. They rebel against Herod and worship the baby and give gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
frankincense: n. a kind of sweet-smelling gum burned as incense.Morals of the gifts
myrrh: n. a kind of gum resin used in perfumes and medicine and incense.Oxford America Dictionary 1980
If you suspect your commander has insincere motives behind his wishes (i.e., Herod had immoral motives) it is correct, as this story shows, to question and rebel against those orders.
All of the gifts have an emphasis on material worth - there are no practical items that would help a baby or its mother. Is gold or scent a more important gift than baby toys, clothes, food, a place to stay? The gifts of the three wise men are materialistic and decorative but I would propose that there are more important things in life that money and incense. If not openly immoral, the gifts were at least amoral, and children's stories should have better (more moral) versions of the Biblical "wise" men.
King Herod's genocide
Matthew 2:16 quickly tells us that King Herod killed all the children under 2yrs old in Bethlehem and the surrounding area.
Conclusions on Matthew's nativity story
As it stands the Three Wise Men is a good fable. King Herod's genocide is not a moral story.
The 7 Deadly Sins, the deadly vices, are listed here in traditional order. This list goes back at least to the sixth century Pope St. Gregory the Great and St. John Cassian, but the refined the list over the years to arrive at the present seven. I will show here how each of these Christian "sins" is actually necessary for the normal functioning of a person.
| 'Vice' | Virtues which requires it | Brief Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| Pride | Quality, Self respect, Achievement | Pride is positive feedback for the things that we do that are good. It is the self satisfaction behind altruism. It is the force behind one's desire to do a job well, to learn skills. |
| Greed | Generosity and Benevolence Motivation | Without Greed we would not know how good it is to receive, and we would not appreciate the pleasure that giving can give. If we were not greedy from time to time we would lose the art of self control. |
| Envy | Consideracy, compassion generosity, humbleness | We only learn to be considerate to others by knowing what it feels like to be left out, to have less: To feel envy. |
| Wrath/Anger | Patience, Friendliness | If we did not feel angry we wouldn't know how to avoid angering others. We wouldn't respect other's personal views, space or property unless we knew the anger that such violations cause. Suppressing ones anger is psychologically dangerous and leads to unstable outbursts of violence. No anger=no social constraints. |
| Lust | Energy, Love | I think this one's neutral. Lust isn't bad, it's what you do with it that counts. Sexual energy can be redirected into many fantastic works, but can also cause unhappiness. |
| Gluttony | Gluttony can be a conditional caused by many biological, genetic and psychological causes and attacking those who suffer from these diseases is immoral, support and advice is better than classifying people as "sinners"! | |
| Sloth | Sloth should be discouraged as much as possible, but not to the extent as to discourage resting. I probably agree that sloth is a sin. |
In some of the cases above the very classification of the trait as a "sin" is immoral, such as "gluttony" for the reasons given above. Surely if Christianity wishes to impose any kind of moral order the sins should at least be formulated to effect changes in people that cause them to become better people, rather than suppressing desire!
Where in this list is violence? Surely "violence" would be a better sin than "anger"? Surely "sexual violation" would be a better sin than "lust"? These sins seems to attack people regardless of how they act, you'd almost get the impression that they are an attempt to make everyone feel like a sinner and set up guilt complexes more than they attempt to rally those who are morally weak.
| Commandment | Criticism |
|---|---|
| 1. You shall have no other God | It is immoral to force "Set is your only mighty deity" on people. (Set is an evil Egyptian god). It is immoral to force any god on people. This is the golden rule - would you like it if a foreign god was forced on you? |
| 2. Have no worshipped idols or imagery | Some religions require it. Telling them not to is immoral, inconsiderate and provokes antisocial behaviour. |
| 3. Do not take the Lords name in vain | The exclamation "Jesus Christ" is uttered many times by atheists. It is a common English phrase in place of "Shit!". Which do you prefer? Can we force people not to say "Bless you" after sneezing because it offends others? Of course not. Likewise with saying "Oh god!". |
| 4. No person or animal shall work on the Sabbath, the Holy day. | The Sabbath is Saturday. What type of moral issue is this? It is a ridiculous and inconsiderate statement! If there is a fire on the Holy day, who would put it out? |
| 5. Honour thy parents | Give honour to your parents, keep their name in good order. Unless of course, they are bad people, in which case upholding this becomes wrong. It is in a young persons interest to know that if they are abused by their parents they tell others - this commandment should not be told to children. |
| 6. Do not kill | What about self defence? - what if they are going to kill you and rape your wife? Then it is more moral to kill the attacker than let him continue. If a person wants to die due to unrecoverable pain and misery, forcing them to live is immoral. Killing a terrorist who is just about to attain hostages may be necessary. |
| 7. Do not commit adultery | Some religions have forced marriages. And members of these religions sometimes temporarily swap wives. In fact, consented wife-swapping is a growing phenomenon. It is immoral for what reason? If there is no moral reason then why is this a commandment? |
| 8. Do not steal | A beggar on the streets is dying. If he steals a loaf of bread one day he lives for a day. When he steals a loaf of bread, no-one else dies as a result. Therefore in this situation it is more moral for him to have a loaf of bread by stealing than not to. |
| 9. Do not lie | Lying is necessary. Santa Claus & tooth fairies are lies. When asked "Are you gay" by a violent homophobe with a gun, it is more moral to lie and live than to die. Lies can save lives, lies can cause pain, such a blanket statement as "Do not lie" is useless. |
| 10. Do not covet they neighbours wife, slaves or belongings. | See the entry for Envy in the section on the 7 deadly sins. |
It is very easy to see how the first four commandments should only be used by Christians in private. Anything else amounts to inconsideracy and an attack on non-Biblical gods, it is unethical and infringes on Human Rights to force a particular (Christian) God on people when it's not what they believe.
Furthermore, commandments five and seven are not moral teachings but "advice", and ill-founded advice at that. Human Beings' natural state is polyamory and endless suffering results from our suppressing this powerful sexual instinct. Some religions allow multiple wives - do Christians want to offend them? Commandment 5 is dangerous, for the reasons given.
The tenth commandment is not moral - envy is not a thought crime, but a natural process enjoyed and employed by all people to facilitate the wish to make one's life better. Without ever knowing of better things, who would try to attain them? Should the poor be happy with their lot or should they try to get more to alleviate their poverty? The commandments would instil everyone with a guilt complex simply for being Human ... which although very a Christian thing is not moral or a psychological sound tactic to get people to behave normally!
The remaining commandments: Six, Eight and Nine do have things going for them. However, every major religion contains very similar, if not better worded, commands! The secular world recognizes and punishes these things well enough, without the need for the other seven commandments. Christians do not rationally examine these commandments; for example the following case shows the irrationallity that they are bound with:
Consider the case of Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Finding himself confronted by the sixth-highest murder rate in the nation, Justice Moore thought it expedient to install a two-and-a-half-ton monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the state courthouse in Montgomery. [...] When a federal court ordered Justice Moore to remove the monument, he refused. [...] According to a Gallup poll [...] 78% of [the American people] objected to the removal of the monument. One wonders whether Moore, Ashcroft, the US Congress, and three-quarters of the American people would like to see the punishments for breaking these hallowed commandments also specified in marble and placed in our nation's courts. What, after all, is the punishment for taking the Lord's name in vain? It happens to be death (Leviticus 24:16). What is the punishment for working on the Sabbath? Also death (Exodus 31:15). What is the punishment for cursing one's father or mother? Death again (Exodus 21:17). What is the punishment for adultery? You're catching on (Leviticus 20:10).
"The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason" by Sam Harris, p154-5
Christians consider the 10 commandments to be somehow better than other religions' proscriptions, but as you can see, if you accept that social evils such as murder are wrong then you can hardly attempt to employ the 10 commandments in a social context, where the Bible itself says that death is the acceptable result of Human misdemeanours such as working on a Sunday. If you violent fanaticism and stonings, then the 10 commandments are just as appropriate as they were during the barbarous dark ages. If you want peace, they are best left behind us in history. In either way, such petit and odd concerns hardly seem worthy of the creator of the universe.
Lot's two daughters make a brief reappearance in the story. After their mother was turned into a pillar of salt, they lived with their father in a cave up a mountain. Starved of male company, they decided to make their father drunk and copulate with him. Lot was beyond noticing when his elder daughter arrived in his bed or when she left, but he was not too drunk to impregnate her. The next night the two daughters agreed it was the younger one's turn. Again Lot was too drunk to notice, and he impregnated her too (Genesis 19:31-6). If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.
The story of Lot and the Sodomites is eerily echoed in chapter 19 of the book of Judges, where an unnamed Levite (priest) was travelling with his concubine in Gibeah. They spent the night in the house of a hospitable old man. While they were eating their supper, the men of the city came and beat on the door, demanding that they old man should hand over his male guest 'so that we may know him'. In almost exactly the same words as Lot, the old man said: 'Nay, my brethren, nay, I pray you, do no so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into mine house do not this folly. Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you; but unto this man do not so vile a thing' (Judges 19:23-4). Again, the misogynistic ethos comes through, loud and clear. I find the phrase 'humble ye them' particularly chilling. Enjoy yourselves by humiliating and raping my daughter and this priest's concubine, but show a proper respect for my guest who is, after all, male. In spite of the similarity between the two stories, the dιnouement was less happy for the Levite's concubine than for Lot's daughters.
The Levite handed her over to the mob, who gang-raped her all night: 'They knew her and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go. Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the main's house where her lord was, till it was light.' (Judges 19:25-6). In the morning, the Levite found his concubine lying prostrate on the doorstep and said - with what we today might see as callous abruptness - 'Up, and let us be going.' But she didn't move. She was dead. So he 'took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel'. Yes, you read correctly. Look it up in Judges 19:29.
"The God Delusion" by Prof. Richard Dawkins, Chapter 7
Revelations is full of mysticism and symbolism, but in its closing moments a clear instruction is revealed by the God of the Christian Bible. Revelation 22:10 reads:
Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, because the time is near. Let him who does wrong continue to do wrong; let him who is vile continue to be vile; let him who does right continue to do right; and let him who is holy continue to be holy.
This does not bode well for social morals, law and order, parenting, and undermines our police and prison service. No wonder, during the Dark Ages, Christian authorities committed countless atrocities and let society run to ruin.
Click to read full page on Slavery and Religion:
"Voodoo priests organized several slave revolts, English economics dictated the end of support for the slave trade... did monotheism play a role in abolition? Emancipation came firstly through slave revolts, and then finally through large scale military and beaurocratic opposition to the slave trade, what made these forces possible? And for those who remained slaves, which forces relieved or increased their suffering? I look at factors that brought the slave trade to an end and conclude that economic forces were the most potent. [...]It is clear that economic interests were the only real factors that turned the tone of the world against Slavery, especially in the case of Britain who then went on to run the most potent large scale campaigns against the Slave Trade in order to further its own worldwide economic strength. After this, the most successful religious campaigns were those under the rule of Voodoo practitioners and priests. Such leaders showed the world that anti-slavery was valid, inspiring hope and valiant anti-slavery efforts, all relying upon the slaves' own will to free themselves. Human morals played their part, but mostly those who opposed the slave trade were religiously non-conformist, whereas conforming religion did and could not oppose the immorality, and Christian and Muslim religious institutions actively encouraged pro-slavery movements."
Click to read full page on Anti-Semitism:
Christianity created anti-semitism. All anti-semitism has been made possible because of the teachings of early and middle ages Christianity. In the early centuries the Roman Empire tolerated most religions including Judaism until Christianity took over; after which it became a monster and oppressor of any non-Christian belief systems. Anti-semitism has always been rife within Christianity, right from the original Church Fathers of the first century and many of the most influential Christian theologians wrote anti-Jewish tracts including Martin Luther. Muslim governments and people through the Middle Ages were more tolerant of beliefs, of science and knowledge, and of Jews, than Western Christianity. Cultures surrounding Western Christian countries were all more tolerant than those inflicted by Christianity. Anti-semitism marched in step with Christianity, was caused by Christian beliefs and was preached from the pulpit by the highest Christian leaders right on through to the twentieth century.
Muslims, pagans and Jews all had superior moral systems to the Christian intolerance and violence towards anything non-Christian. No other religion has displayed such immovable hatred towards another religion as Christianity did towards the Jews. No holy war has ever lasted so long and been so bloody as the one the Christians waged against innocent Jews. History provides us with only few occasions where Jews, or even Muslims or pagans, were as intolerant or morally corrupt as the West was under Christian rule. Thankfully modern Christianity, since it lost its power, is generally more humane. Christianity has slowly been forced to change its ways mostly due to pressure from increasingly powerful secular, poly-cultural governments and changing culture.
My page: Refuting Christianity refutes most of the key points of Christianity, Adam and Eve, The virgin birth and nativity myths, Jesus' Divine nature and more. This page shows that despite common belief the Bible's most famous fables are not particularly moral stories.
To base your moral system on the teachings of the modern Church about Jesus is to be lost both spiritually and morally on lies that can only ever serve as a useful metaphor by coincidence and accident.
It is more moral to admit that it is us, as individuals, that describe and feel evil, and that our concept of evil changes over time. It is more moral to seek out better versions of what we call evil and more moral versions of what we choose to call good.
The Christian ethos of inherent sin and then salvation, under the threat of God, is not necessary and is indeed counterproductive to the maturing morality of our species. Dogma and ritually laid out moral 'values' only cause rejection and strife: It is more moral to do what is moral now rather than what is written by a warrior race of Romans!
Related essays:
Dawkins, Prof. Richard
"The God Delusion" (2006 hardback). Published by Bantam Press, Transworld Publishers, Uxbridge Road, London, UK.
Harris, Sam
"The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason" (2006 ed). Published in UK by The Great Free Press, 2005.
James, William
"The Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902). From the Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh 1901-1902, first Edition printed 1960. Quotes from fifth edition, 1971, Collins. [Book Review]
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900)
"Thus Spake Zarathustra" (1885).
Wilson, Bryan
"Religion in Secular Society" (1966). Penguin Books softback first edition.
Women clergy
The 7 Deadly Sins and the virtues they oppress
www.dimensional.com/~randl: Some atrocities of Christianity
www.dimensional.com/~randl: Some methods used when torturing witches
Religion inspired suffering (especially of the Jews) in history
Alternative 10 commandments to the old intolerant Christian ones.
Some tragic cases of faith healing and Christian Scientists.
Religious tolerance.org: The bible and abortion
Is it OK to steal?
Moral weakness of Christianity by Mark Vuletic 1996.
God and Moral Autonomy by James Rachels - it's immoral that we should worship a creator.
Bible passages that appear immoral by today's standards
By Vexen Crabtree 1999 Dec 20