Queen confers knighthood on Salman Rushdie

I will definitely have to pick up the Satanic Verses. Sounds interesting.

In sacred scriptures the divine, or at least sublime, and the demonic aspects of human nature are mixed and flow together in a dangerous cocktail that often serves to seduce human beings away from what may be called their universal moral and social duties as dictated by conscience.

This is basically the same thing that Richard Dawkins is saying, especially in The God Delusion, that morality is in fact universal and comes from our shared humanity, our shared genetic evolution. He partially proves this by alluding to the Christians who claim that without the Bible humans have no moral compass. He blows that theory to bits in the following way:

1. When the bad things in the Old Testament are mentioned to most Christians today, stoning of adulterers, all the genocide in the Bible supposedly carried out at God's command, most of them are quick to point out that we no longer live under the rules of the Old Testament.
2. Conceding this point, Dawkins asks what then are the moral parameters that we are using today to make those value judgements about what is still to be followed in the Old Testament and what is to be tossed aside as relics of a bygone era. For instance, why do we now say it is NOT ok to stone adulterers. 3. Apparently, whatever sense of morality we are using today to make these value judgements can not be coming from the Bible itself, for the Bible tells us to stone adulterers, yet we today, in a more enlightened era, say that this is "cruel and unusual punishment." 4. This sense of morality that we are using to make these value judgements, coming from outside the Bible itself, actually comes from within our shared humanity, it is in fact a shared universal morality that is evolving with the centuries. 5. This shows that morality is in fact universal and that we do not need the Bible to allow us to be moral. In fact, our shared universal morality tells us NOT to follow the teachings of the Bible.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that how you describe the them of the Satanic Verses seems to agree with Richard Dawkins and evolutionary universal morality.

Phaedrus72,

They say Jesus Christ was the Son of God. But the best part of him was human.

And yet the point is that you're using something OUTSIDE of the Bible to guide you as to what is and is not moral. This completely contradicts (and in fact demolishes) the notion that the Bible is what gives us our moral compass.

Yes Lunar, see my comment 1.1. I see that at least you understand the ramifications of what spikgary and others are saying. It's like Richard Dawkins says, these people use these arguments because they've heard their pastor use them, but in reality when you press them on it, you realize that they have not even thought through the full ramifications of what they are saying and what they ARE saying when they say we no longer follow the Old Testament is that morality is universal and is in fact to be found OUTSIDE of the Bible, not within it, otherwise they would have no basis whatsoever to claim that the Old Testament Law was no longer moral. It's so simple really, and when I read it for the first time in The God Delusion I was surprised that I had never thought of it before myself. I, myself, have used the same argument before, "yes, but we follow Jesus and the New Testament now, not the Old Testament, we are now under a New dispensation." But Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Also the Bible says that God is the same yesterday today and forever, so the God of the Old Testament has to be the same God of the New and unless a Christian wants to claim that God changed his mind about certain things it must be conceded that some of the Old Testament was and is simply immoral. It is simply immoral and I might add, in our country, unconstitutional, to stone adulterers to death. It is immoral and illegal and unconstitutional to stone children for disrespecting their parents. We know this today because we all share the same universal sense of morality. It is just something that we know. An Atheists knows it is wrong to stone people to death for minor crimes, actually for personal behaviors which shouldn't even be a crime to begin with. An Atheists knows this just as much as a Christian knows this. The difference is that an Atheist knows where this true sense of morality comes from, while the Christian has to fold his mind into convoluted contortions in order to justify that apparently God changed his mind between the Old and the New Testament.