Religion: pros & cons (Religion)

by dhw, Monday, October 20, 2014, 14:55 (3687 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: We do not deliberately shorten life. We do not murder. We even avoid unsafe acts which may lead to early death or injury of ourselves and others. We do everything we can to ensure a long life and happiness because we too believe that God wants us to enjoy, enrich, save, and preserve life. However, there is a line beyond which we simply do not cross. Would you kill to save a life? Would you steal to save a life? Would it matter to you if the amount stolen was $5 or $1,000,000,000. This in essence is your argument: This law is not as important as a life, so we can break it if there is a life involved.-This sums up the great gap in our thinking. In all your posts you have emphasized the need to obey God's laws, but you never acknowledge the possibility that your interpretation of the texts purporting to lay down these laws might be faulty. You do acknowledge that mistakes have been made in the past, and in a different context such as evolution, you would seize on such confessions as reasons for doubting the present consensus. But in this case, you are prepared to dismiss the combined scholarship of Jews and virtually every other branch of Christianity as “ignorance”.
 
The questions you have asked me pose clear moral dilemmas: we know the meaning of “killing” and “stealing”, both of which harm other people. But the dilemma in this context is far from clear. Whatever the original words may have meant (translation is a subjective exercise), we know that the people who wrote these texts did not have blood transfusions in mind, since the procedure did not exist. Would you then allow a child to die because a tiny minority of biblical scholars believe eating and ingesting are synonymous with transfusing? Of course you have the right to let yourself die, and that is why I am using the example of a child. You say you believe God wants us to enjoy and preserve life. You have also said that some of the most vicious laws in the OT were cancelled by the “new covenant”. The article I referred to quoted Luke 6, 7-10, in which Jesus cured a man's withered hand on the Sabbath, and the author comments that “Jesus invoked the Rabbinic principle...that the obligation to save life supersedes Jewish law.” In the scenario we are discussing here, it is not even clear that a law is being broken. And we also know that barring the unforeseen - a proviso that applies to all medications and operations - this manner of taking blood is harmless to the donor as well as life-saving to the recipient. Do you really believe, then, that the Jesus who cured on the Sabbath would have refused to allow the child to have a transfusion?-The blood example has taken over our discussion, as I'm sure it often does when you discuss these matters with outsiders. But the discussion in itself serves only to illustrate my point: that the bible is wide open to interpretation. One can hardly say it's not, when your own interpretation is so fiercely contested by your fellow biblical scholars. The “I am right and they are wrong” approach certainly does not mean that the text itself is clear.