It has often been suggested
that one reason why “Religion is a good thing” is that it makes people behave
better. Apart from religion-based civil wars, this is probably true, although I
am not sure how I like the idea of a “deception-based” code of behaviour. “If
you don’t clean your teeth tonight, they will fall out in the morning”, may be
effective as a way of enforcing bedtime discipline in the short term, but has
long-term effects on credibility.
But we like rules. This
might be a particularly English thing. We sometimes pretend we don’t, but faced
with a social problem (e.g. litter or dogs chasing swans), there are calls for
rules. We don’t necessarily like keeping to them, and there is a great deal of special
pleading: “Those don’t apply to me in these circumstances” and motoring seems
to bring out the “special pleading” in the English.
Leaving all that
aside, when it comes to morals, I am not on very good ground. Although, I am not
a serial criminal, fraudster or otherwise serially dishonest, I cannot point to
a string of good deeds, or even individual ones for that matter, and say that I
did these. Having made that personal disclaimer (i.e. do as I say, not as I
do), we can get on with the subject.
The whole things starts,
I suppose, with the Ten Commandments. Hands up, those of you who can recite all
ten. All Ten. (Add an additional 10 points, if you get the order correct). Hands
down – not many of you then.
Apart from the Ten
Commandments, and a lot of instructions on how to build temples and arks and
which food could be eaten or not eaten, we do not get a lot of specific help
from the Old Testament on these points.
This is not entirely
true. Leviticus, the third book in the Bible (click here) has a large amount of ritual and ceremonial
law, which does not seem very relevant today. However, some moral laws are
embedded in here (although how you determine which is ceremonial and which is
moral is not always as clear as you might think).
However, a general theme emerges in the Old Testament of what it means to obey God and follow Him in a practical way. As this only appears from time to time, you have to pay attention. A blog from March earlier this year, [click here] describes some of behaviour that God requires from us, and these are very general “Love Mercy, not Sacrifice”. (A bit like “Drive Safely”, as opposed to “Do not drive faster than 30 mph”)
The Book of Proverbs (somewhere
is the middle of the Bible, just after the Psalms) [click here] gives a
huge amount of specific moral advice in the form of what is wise and sensible,
rather than as a set of rules. It sets out these pieces of advice in the form
of “Actions” and “Consequences”, with consequences being of both the earthly
and eternal varieties (but mainly earthly).
But the New Testament
is more specific. The New Testament gives us plenty of instructions on these
points, for example on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 [click here]. For example, we are to give to him who begs; we must not think bad things
about someone else; we must love our enemies.
On the other hand, later
there is the statement that we should love our neighbour as ourselves, followed
immediately by the famous parable of “the Good Samaritan”. This is fairly general
and it is left to us how to interpret this, but it seems a pretty high target
to me.
Then of course, there
is Jesus’ encounter with the young rich man, who wished to obtain eternal life
and was told to sell all he had, to give the money to the poor and follow Jesus.
(Mark 10.17) [clickhere]
These are daunting
statements and if not daunting, then at least puzzling– well, at least I find
them puzzling. What are we to make of them? We do our best to wriggle out of
taking this literally. (We are in trouble if we do take them literally, but we
wrestle with the English tendency to take rules literally, before finding a
reason why they do not apply to us – see above)
Then, the letters of
the Apostles contain large numbers of moral rules. For example, the Book of
James [click for link] reads in parts is fairly
angry tirade against breaches of moral rules and he warns of the punishment to
come, especially against Bankers (well, sort of against Bankers).
As a final and
completely disconnected point, there are some community “rules”, which are made
for our own individual and joint benefit. Preserving Sunday as a “Day of Rest”
is for our individual and Man’s overall benefit. We have made it into a “Day of
Shopping”, although this does not appear to have brought down fire from heaven,
at least not yet (or has it?)
A blog with no conclusion,
I’m afraid.
