Christians who tell me the words "I believe in the Bible" almost never mean that they think that people who strike their parents should be executed (Exodus 21:15), that people with working minds who don't intellectually test everything are sinning (1 Thessalonians 5:21), that capital punishment for adultery is just (Deuteronomy 22:22), or that in the Christian worldview there are no moral obligations outside of the ones God has revealed (Deuteronomy 4:2). They usually don't really know, understand, or follow the morality of the Bible. As a result, it can be a nightmare navigating the fallacies and errors relied on by many of them with regards to moral reasoning. They are prone to selectively affirming and dismissing Biblical injunctions, allowing their emotions, preferences, and cultures to shape their understanding of ethics.
As a theonomist and a rationalist, I find it very odd that Christians squirm when atheists sometimes accuse them of cherry picking what Old Testament commands to follow (as an aside, much of the Old Testament is grossly misunderstood by every party). That is exactly what American Christians do much of the time. They flee from admitting that the Bible commands execution for certain moral offenses and then, of all the damn things they could have picked out of the Old Testament to rally around, they seem to focus disproportionately on the fact that Mosaic Law condemns homosexuality. Most people I have met who call themselves Christians neither believe nor enact the actual system of ethics taught in the Bible. If they did either, they would completely reorient their moral epistemology and would stop condemning both what the Bible commands and things it does not call sin.
I have never heard or read a sermon that targeted anti-intellectualism (1 Peter 3:15, Proverbs 19:2, 1 Thessalonians 5:21), prison rape (Deuteronomy 22:25-27) or by extension the heinously unbiblical American prison system, or the very foundations of the impulse to believe in extra-Biblical moral obligations (Deuteronomy 4:2). But I've definitely heard and read sermons condemning all sorts of activities that the Bible does not condemn or even sometimes calls good:
1. Being alone with members of the opposite gender
2. Unmarried men and women praying together alone [1]
3. Close opposite gender friendships [2]
4. Use of profanity [3]
5. Public nudity [4]
6. Non-Christian music [5]
7. Bikinis [6]
8. Lack of adherence to gender roles that are nonexistent on the Christian worldview [7]
9. The sound position that the obligatory nature of Mosaic Law did not change during or after the ministry of Jesus [8]
Churches seem to largely have replaced legitimate Biblical ethics with cultural mores or personal preferences, ignoring what the Bible actually tells them to do while instead condemning things it never does. In fact, many Christians I have met will at best claim to follow Biblical values like justice or sexual morality and then merely adopt a kind of cultural relativism with regards to what the specifics of those values look like. I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the stupidity, ignorance, hypocrisy, and utterly inept reasoning that I see in many Christians--in my talks with Christians I've had to beat down so many non sequiturs, appeals to emotion, appeals to tradition, appeals to popularity, and plenty of other fallacies. Mosaic Law revealed specific moral obligations for humans to uphold and prohibited addition to God's commands (Deuteronomy 4:2) and Jesus upheld the veracity of Mosaic Law (Matthew 5:17-19) and condemned those who added to God's revealed obligations (Matthew 15:3-9), yet the congregations of many churches trample on these instructions. They instead choose to pursue an inverse morality totally foreign to Christianity and reason.
God reveals what sin is, and I, left to myself, do not know how to identify it. Any other human who shares my limitations does not know either. Not only do reason and philosophy point to theonomy--by establishing moral skepticism about the human conscience, that morality cannot exist in an atheistic universe, that morality (if it exists) is a reflection of God's nature, and that I know only my own nature and not that of an outside God (thus any external God must reveal his nature to me for me to know it)--but in the Bible itself we read of Paul affirming how apart from God's moral revelation of Mosaic Law he could not know what sin is (Romans 7:7). Only God can reveal the nature of sin to humans. And yet many Christians arbitrarily reject Biblical moral teachings or cherry pick which ones to adhere to while devising extra-Biblical moral systems and acting as if their subjective preferences and traditions have any objective moral authority.
Christian readers, do you believe in Biblical morality? Do you really?
[1]. One person at my current church actually said from the pulpit that praying with someone the opposite gender in solitude other than your spouse is a level of intimacy reserved only for marriage! What the fuck goes through the minds of these fallacious people? Sex is the only damn thing the Bible says married people aren't to engage in with other people!
[2]. See here for refutations of common beliefs in the church about this and related issues:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/05/fear-byproduct-of-complementarian.html
B. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/opposite-gender-friendships-part-1.html
[3]. See here:
A. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/07/profanity-profane-or-permissible.html
B. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-fallacies-of-anti-profanity.html
[4]. See here:
A. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/bible-on-nudity-part-1.html
B. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/bible-on-nudity-part-2-refutation-of.html
[5]. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/a-defense-of-metal-genre.html
[6]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-folly-of-modesty-part-1.html
B. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-folly-of-modesty-part-2.html
[7]. See here:
A. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/why-ephesians-5-does-not-teach-rigid.html
B. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-alleged-differences-between-men-and.html
[8]. See here:
A. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/11/romans-13-and-reconstructionism.html
B. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/07/jesus-and-paul-on-mosaic-law.html
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