When drafting my previous inconsistency, I stumbled upon another inconsistency, namely generational curses. There are contradictory verses in the Bible concerning such curses. I’ll begin with the verses that speak about generational curses:
6 And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”
Exodus 34:6,7
37 They will stumble over one another as though fleeing from the sword, even though no one is pursuing them. So you will not be able to stand before your enemies. 38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you. 39 Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their ancestors’ sins they will waste away.
Leviticus 26:37-39
8 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 9 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 10 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Deuteronomy 5:8-10
I provided some antecedent verses to nullify any possible “out of context” arguments. The following verse contradicts all of the above verses:
16 Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.
Deuteronomy 24:16
There is a difference between punishment and death, but the verses in Leviticus speak of death due to the sins of their ancestors. There are also verses like 1 Samuel 15:3 and Hosea 9:11-16. If the children aren’t punished with death, how do those verses make sense?
I argue that they don’t make any sense. Generational curses don’t make sense either. The notion is utterly inhumane. I’m well aware of apologetic attempts to justify such verses; I’m also aware of their attempts to reconcile the contradiction. However, they fail at providing a cogent explanation. One blogger posits that the sins of the fathers become the sins of the children. I guess we should start charging children as adults when they steal or shoot someone by accident with a gun one of their negligent parents left on the nightstand. There’s nothing humane about children being punished for their parents’ sins, crimes, or negligent acts. The innocent shouldn’t be charged in place of the guilty. Then again, Christianity is based on a similar principle — one where an innocent man died for the sins of mankind. Such a tenet is morally reprehensible. The core of Christianity acts against the betterment of humanity. We don’t need to be saved from imaginary offenses.
The Bible is a book full of outdated moral codes; one cannot pretend that it is entirely valid whilst picking cherries. Either follow it in its entirety or realize that you’re the moral agent — no “word of god” is necessary. In other words, you have drafted your own code of ethics based on your upbringing, society, and other environmental factors. Scrutinize the book briefly; now tell me a moral code that isn’t rooted either in common sense (i.e. Exodus 20:13) or barbarity (i.e. Deuteronomy 21:18-21)?
In a new book, anthropologist Christopher Boehm traces the steps our species went through to attain a conscience.
Why do people show kindness to others, even those outside their families, when they do not stand to benefit from it? Being generous without that generosity being reciprocated does not advance the basic evolutionary drive to survive and reproduce.
Christopher Boehm, an evolutionary anthropologist, is the director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California. For 40 years, he has observed primates and studied different human cultures to understand social and moral behavior. In his new book, Moral Origins, Boehm speculates that human morality emerged along with big game hunting. When hunter-gatherers formed groups, he explains, survival essentially boiled down to one key tenet—cooperate, or die.
First of all, how do you define altruism?
Basically, altruism involves generosity outside of the family, meaning generosity toward non-kinsmen.
Why is altruism so difficult to explain in evolutionary terms?
A typical hunter-gatherer band of the type that was universal in the world 15,000 years ago has a few brothers or sisters, but almost everyone else is unrelated. The fact that they do so much sharing is a paradox genetically. Here are all these unrelated people who are sharing without being bean counters. You would expect those who are best at cheating, and taking but not giving, to be coming out ahead. Their genes should be on the rise while altruistic genes would be going away. But, in fact, we are evolved to share quite widely in bands.
What did Charles Darwin say about this “altruism paradox?”
Charles Darwin was profoundly perplexed by the fact that young men voluntarily go off to war and die for their groups. This obviously didn’t fit with his general idea of natural selection as being individuals pursuing their self-interests.
He came up with group selection as an answer to this paradox. The way it worked, if one group has more altruists than another, it is going to outcompete the other group and outreproduce it. The groups with fewer altruists would have fewer survivors. Therefore, altruism would spread at the expense of selfishness.
The problem with group selection has been that it is very hard to see how it could become strong enough to trump selection between individuals. You need an awful lot of warfare and genocide to really make group selection work.
And what did Darwin have to say about the origins of the human conscience?
What he did really was to take the conscience, set it aside as something very special and then basically say, “I throw up my hands. I can’t tell you how this could have evolved. What I can tell you is that any creature that became as intelligent and as sympathetic as humans would naturally have a conscience.”
Fast-forward a century and half—where are we now in understanding the origins of human morality and conscience?
Well, there are quite a few books on the subject. But they are almost all arguments out of evolutionary design; that is, they simply look at morality and see how it functions and how it could have been genetically useful to individuals. My book is the first to actually try to look at the natural history of moral evolution. At what time and how did developments take place which led us to become moral? In a way, this is a new field of study.
Why are some of us caring and some of us cruel, some generous and some greedy? Paul J. Zakon the new science of morality— and how it could be used to create a more virtuous society.
Could a single molecule—one chemical substance—lie at the very center of our moral lives?
Research that I have done over the past decade suggests that a chemical messenger called oxytocin accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are coldhearted louts, why some people cheat and steal and others you can trust with your life, why some husbands are more faithful than others, and why women tend to be nicer and more generous than men. In our blood and in the brain, oxytocin appears to be the chemical elixir that creates bonds of trust not just in our intimate relationships but also in our business dealings, in politics and in society at large.
Known primarily as a female reproductive hormone, oxytocin controls contractions during labor, which is where many women encounter it as Pitocin, the synthetic version that doctors inject in expectant mothers to induce delivery. Oxytocin is also responsible for the calm, focused attention that mothers lavish on their babies while breast-feeding. And it is abundant, too, on wedding nights (we hope) because it helps to create the warm glow that both women and men feel during sex, a massage or even a hug.
If we reject Deuteronomy and Leviticus (as all enlightened moderns do), by what criteria do we then decide which of religion’s moral values to accept} Or should we pick and choose among all the world’s religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?
Empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity — caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share.
This video is for anyone who argues that morality stems from religion. There is substantial evidence supporting my argument; morality is a byproduct of our evolution. In retrospect, it is easy to conclude that our ancestors didn’t consider morality. However, like modern day mammals, they showed the tell-tale signs of what came to be known as morality (i.e. cooperation, empathy, etc.). As our mammalian cousins climb up the evolutionary ladder, their version of morality will become all the more apparent. Before this though, they must develop spoken language. This generation will be long gone by the time this begins to happen, but when considering what we can know via hindsight, the inevitability of this occurrence is absolute barring mass extinction or some other catastrophic event.
Pondering the neuroscience of moral platitudes, free will, and sacred values.
“The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile,” asserted 18th century French physiologist Pierre Cabanis. Last week, the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies convened a conference of neuroscientists and philosophers to ponder how our brains secrete thoughts about ethics and morality. The first presenter was neuroeconomist Gregory Berns from Emory University whose work peers into brains to see in which creases of gray matter those values we hold sacred lodge. The study, “The Price of Your Soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values,” was just published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
