Religion in Practice

Many recent authors have correctly pointed out that some of the things written in the most popular religious texts can have no positive effect on people's moral and ethical values. If we were to literally apply it, it would make us evil rather than good. In order to determine whether this was so of a religious text in general, I thought I could look at a sample of phrases that came from the Holy Bible and compare this to what we might find in Aristotle. We would be interested which one would, if interpreted literally contain a greater proportion of good moral and ethical advice. This would be a way of determining to what extent the religious text added value to the religion in this regard.

However, there was another author who suggested that reading a religious text from front to back would not be a very good way of determining how good it was at imparting good moral and ethical values. I suspect this is true. There are some portions of the religious texts that are probably seldom read and play little or no role in helping to form the adherent's moral and ethical values. If the "bad" parts are read less often than the "good" ones, then selecting phrases at random would give us a distorted picture.

In Jesus Interrupted, Bart Ehrman points out that scripture is used for devotional purpose. That is typically the minister will select some passage and then use it to tell the congregation how they should be living their lives. There are two points to make here. First the selection of a passage is not taken at random. Some passages are selected far more often than others. Second, the message need not follow what we would regard as original intent based on literal interpretation.