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- The Good Life vs The Bad Life
Today’s morning bike ride through the cold winter trees of Northeast was nothing short of consciousness boosting.
The first half of the ride I was listening to Sam Harris’s “The Moral Landscape”, a book about how he envisions that science can determine human moral values - arguing that there is no need to rely on thousand year old religious books in order to know what is right and wrong.
Sam, while making complex points about important topics such as the nature of the human mind, and how we can maximize human well being, is actually simultaneously one of the funniest writers I’ve ever read.
Here’s an excerpt that I find absolutely hilarious:
The Bad Life and the Good Life
For my argument about the moral landscape to hold, I think one need only grant two points: (1) some people have better lives than others, and (2) these differences relate, in some lawful and not entirely arbitrary way, to states of the human brain and to states of the world. To make these premises less abstract, consider two generic lives that lie somewhere near the extremes on this continuum:
The Bad Life
You are a young widow who has lived her entire life in the midst of civil war. Today, your seven-year-old daughter was raped and dismembered before your eyes. Worse still, the perpetrator was your fourteen-year-old son, who was goaded to this evil at the point of a machete by a press gang of drug-addled soldiers. You are now running barefoot through the jungle with killers in pur-suit. While this is the worst day of your life, it is not entirely out of character with the other days of your life: since the moment you were born, your world has been a theater of cruelty and violence. You have never learned to read, taken a hot shower, or traveled beyond the green hell of the jungle. Even the luckiest people you have known have experienced little more than an occasional respite from chronic hunger, fear, apathy, and confusion. Unfo-tunately, you've been very unlucky, even by these bleak standards.
Your life has been one long emergency, and now it is nearly over.
The Good Life
You are married to the most loving, intelligent, and charismatic person you have ever met. Both of you have careers that are intellectually stimulating and financially rewarding. For decades, your wealth and social connections have allowed you to devote yourself to activities that bring you immense personal satisfaction. One of your greatest sources of happiness has been to find creative ways to help people who have not had your good fortune in life. In fact, you have just won a billion-dollar grant to to benefit children in the developing world. If asked, you would say that you could not imagine how your time on earth could be better spent. Due to a combination of good genes and optimal circumstances, you and your closest friends and family will live very long, healthy lives, untouched by crime, sudden bereavements, and other misfortunes.
Maybe I have a problem, but I find this excerpt extremely hilarious in a dry-dark humor type of way. The creativity behind the absurdity of the “bad life” when juxtaposed with a “good life” puts the argument of any opposition in a tough position. In this instance, Sam’s opposition would have to argue, one, that there is no difference between these two life situations (which would make them look like a complete idiot). And two, that if some random tribal culture determined that “The Bad Life” was actually the better than “The Good Life” that we could not place any moral judgements on that tribe.
And in this juxtoposition lies the crux of the argument of the book: that we are more than capable of making moral judgements about good and bad, right and wrong using our own minds, and need not rely on any ancient books or religions.
But I degress…
Earlier this year, one of the inspirations that spawned my desire to start reading the Bible was that I had begun to notice that a lot of the Christian lifestyle recommendations — in specific those regarding choosing a wife, how to build a good relationship, and how to combat evil… these recommendations were actually pretty good.
It’s become more and more clear to me that it is in fact a good idea to ‘wait until marriage’ to have sex. That a man will be pretty happy if he selects a wife based on the Proverbs 31 outline, and that (most) women may likely even be happiest in their nature if they ascribe to be a Proverbs 31 woman.
Yet, where I believe most religions go wrong is that they cherry pick the obviously good recommendations while ignoring the countless amount of ridiculousness that you can find only a few pages away.
For example in the Bible you will find these verses:
“If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, 'Let us go and worship other gods'... Do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them. You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people. Stone them to death...” - Deuteronomy 13:6-10
Or, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" - Exodus 22:18
Or, "If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity." - Deuteronomy 25:11-12
OR, “Yet she increased her prostitution, remembering the days of her youth when she engaged in prostitution in the land of Egypt. She lusted after their genitals as large as those of donkeys, and their seminal emission was as strong as that of stallions.” - Ezekiel 23:19-20
Or, “"But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you." - Deuteronomy 22:20-21
“Now it came about at the lodging place on the way that the LORD met him and sought to put him to death. Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and threw it at Moses’ feet, and she said, “You are indeed a bridegroom of blood to me.” - Exodus 4:24-25
Now of course, the educated defense of the Bible will say something along the lines of, “Well, yes these may seem absurd. But when interpreting these ‘challenging’ passages from the Bible, it's essential to consider their historical and cultural context, as they were written in times and societies vastly different from our own…. Passages such as these also require understanding the specific literary genres and ‘narrative contexts’ within the Bible. Theological interpretations often view these texts through the lens of overarching themes like grace and redemption, as opposed to literal words of law or action.”
Or something like that.
Look, I believe the Bible possesses great wisdom, but I’m not going to blindly pretend that it is perfect when it has stuff in here like this. Regardless of the ‘narrative contexts’ or whatever.
I personally believe that the strongest argument that Christians or really any religious person has to support the power and ‘possible divinity’ of religious texts is the length at which they continue to stay relevent.
I mean, perhaps God is just the ultimate memer. He knew that thousands of years later, people would still be getting ‘click baited’ by the stuff in the bible like, ‘cutting off foreskin’ or ‘stoning prostitutes’ or ‘burning witches’.
Perhaps God is just the best marketer of all time, and knew that putting these types of stories in the Bible would fire people up for eternity, and thus bring them ultimately closer to the higher truths you can find in the Bible.
I mean who knows. really.
Curious what you think, DM me on ig.
-Arlin