The Ultimate Source for Morality and Everything Else

The following is my response to someone from Australia on the topic of “free speech.” I pointed out that Australia does not have a provision in its Constitution for “freedom of speech.”

SB: We have more freedom than the US. Look it up kid. Also, the Bible isn’t Western. It is an adopted Eastern religion. Hypocrites.

GD: The Bible not being “western” is irrelevant. In addition, I’m not a “kid.”

First, I did not mention the Bible. The topic of discussion was “freedom of speech,” which is enshrined in our Constitution, along with four additional freedoms. There are differences between Australia and the United States on the subject:

Second, the Bible is a Middle Eastern or Near Eastern text. What this has to do with anything is a mystery to me. The Bible originated “at the center of the world” (Ezek. 38:12), in what Jesus described as the “heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40). Its revelation had its most significant impact in the western part of the world and as far as the eastern border of Russia, parts of northern Africa, and I would add, Australia. Israel was chosen for this purpose: “See, I have taught you statutes and ordinances just as the LORD my God has commanded me, so that you may follow them in the land that you are about to enter and possess. Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the peoples, who will hear of all these statutes and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people’” (Deut. 4:5-6).

Third, one of the first translations of the Bible was compiled in Ethiopia between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. The first book to come off Gutenberg’s printing press was the Latin translation of the Bible.

Fourth, I suggest you read Tom Holland’s book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. This is from the dust jacket: “‘We are all 21st century people,’ Richard Dawkins has said, ‘and we subscribe to a pretty widespread consensus of what is right and wrong.’ Yet what are the origins of this consensus? It has not remotely been a given, across the reaches of space and time, that humans should believe it nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering, or that people are all of equal value. These are convictions which instead bear witness to the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, a revolution in values that has proven transformative like nothing else in history: Christianity.” Holland is an atheist.

You might also try Vishal Mangalwaldi’s The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. Begin with the chapter on Morality. Multiculturalism, the kind that claims that all value systems are equal, has failed, as those familiar with history predicted it would. Margaret Thatcher saw the future of England, and possibly the future of the United States, committed to such a preposterous idea. On May 21, 1988, she made the following comments to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland:

“We are a nation whose ideals were founded on the Bible. Also, it is quite impossible to understand our literature without grasping this fact. That is the strong practical case for ensuring that children at school are given adequate instruction in the part which the Judaeo-Christian tradition has played in moulding our laws, manners and institutions. How can you make sense of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, or of the constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century in both Scotland and England, without such fundamental knowledge? But I would go further than this. The truths of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are infinitely precious, not only, as I believe, because they are true, but also because they provide the moral impulse which alone can lead to that peace, in the true meaning of the word, for which we all long. . . .

“But there is little hope for democracy if the hearts of men and women in democratic societies cannot be touched by a call to something greater than themselves. Political structures, state institutions, collective ideals are not enough. We Parliamentarians can legislate for the rule of law. . . . [Democracy requires] the life of faith. . . . as much to the temporal as to the spiritual welfare of the nation.”[1]

Also see Rodney Stark’s The Triumph of Christianity and For the Glory of God, Peter Heather’s Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300, and Joseph Boot’s The Mission of God. There are many more.

SB: What is this word salad? None of this stayed on point. Go take some more slaves because the Bible says so. Ethics did NOT come from the Bible. Weird tangent you went on.

GD: You mentioned “eastern religion.” I corrected your claim and gave some historical context on the Bible’s influence on the Western part of the world. Sorry if you couldn’t understand it.

If the Bible had been followed, there never would have been chattel slavery. “Now one who kidnaps [steals] someone, whether he sells him or he is found in his possession, shall certainly be put to death” (Ex. 21:16; also Rev. 18:13). It was Christians in Britain who worked to end the slave trade. See the work of William Wilberforce (1759-1833), an English member of parliament and social reformer who was instrumental in the abolition of the slave trade and ultimately slavery in the British Empire.

Given atheistic and evolutionary assumptions, neither rape nor slavery would be morally wrong. See A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer. The same would be true for slavery, since some people were thought to be born slaves, and there is no higher law that slavery was morally wrong.

Aristotle believed in the reasonableness and “natural order” of the institution of slavery because there are some people who are “slaves by nature,” a phrase found in his Politics. Aristotle’s views, as a champion of reason, made their way to the early years of discovery: “Of all the ideas churned up during the early tumultuous years of American history, none had a more dramatic application than the attempts made to apply to the natives there the Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery: that one part of mankind is set aside by nature to be slaves in the service of masters born for a life of virtue free of manual labour.”[2] Aristotelian cosmology and morality prevailed in the West.

There’s nothing inherently moral in an evolutionary worldview. While not all morality comes from the Bible, the Bible serves as the precondition for morality. “If science is the modern deity, then the public is on the verge of deicide.”[3]

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[1] Quoted in Michael Alison and David L. Edwards, eds., Christianity and Conservatism (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990), 337­-338. Cited by Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011), 161-162.

[2] Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959), 12-13.

[3] Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2018), 176.

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