It's not my job to interpret the Bible. Doing so gives it more credibility than it deserves. And it's full of nasty ideas.
While it's claimed to be God's instructions to us, in order to become better people, it is in fact nothing more than a recounting of ancient legends (often false, e.g., the Jews were
gastarbeiters in Egypt, not slaves--paid as well as any other workers, and often given managerial positions) and a compendium of
human attitudes.
The New Testament is quite a bit more preachy. Apparently God took a class in anger management, stopped "smiting" us (coincidentally at a moment when the Romans, compulsive recordkeepers, stood ready to write it all down in real time), and sent down the First Hippie to teach us about peace, love and understanding.
Atheist or not, I love Jesus. The same way I love Frodo Baggins and Kermit the Frog. It doesn't matter that they're not real, they're good teachers.
There are all sorts of social institutions that have nothing to do with religion.
And just as many that do.
As I noted to Trooper, human beings are inherently selfish, some more than others.
You ignore our prehistory. We are a
pack-social species. Our biology (no fangs, no claws, babies that need the constant care of
both parents until adolescence) makes us singularly unsuited for the life of a solitary hunter. Going all the way back to
Ardipithecus, the first primate (yet discovered) to break off from the chimpanzee evolutionary line and establish the human line, we have always lived in large extended-family groups. This is hardly a surprise, since all the other Great Apes except the orangutan are also pack-social.
So contrary to your assertion, (sane, non-sociopathic) human beings do indeed have an
instinct to nurture, protect and help the few dozen people who have nurtured, protected and helped them since birth. Without this most of us would die before reproducing, and within a couple of generations the species would be extinct.
The institutions we have built since the Neolithic Revolution (the dawn of agriculture, which both allowed and required us to settle in permanent villages) have simply stretched our sense of "family." The village, the city, the state, the nation, the empire, the trans-national hegemony such as the E.U.... each of these elaborations teases us into overriding our Stone Age instinct and applying the term "pack-mate," first to people we haven't known since birth, then people we barely know at all, then people in the next town, until today we apply it to people on the other side of the planet who are merely abstractions. Periodically we tire of the effort and start shooting them, but in the long run our history is one of collaboration rather than pack-rivalry. The internet and the cellphone have made this easier, since people on the other side of the planet are now our Facebook buddies, and primitive translation software actually allows us to say nice things about the photos of each other's children.
Living in Australia, perhaps you didn't pay much attention when Neda Agha Soltan was gunned down by a government thug on a street in Tehran, while watching an anti-government demonstration. Her friends and relatives spammed real-time cell-phone videos of the tragedy to everyone they know, and Iranians have friends and relatives everywhere. Within two days they had circled the planet. Americans wept for Neda: she was OUR friend, OUR sister, OUR daughter. Country music singers, who represent the most xenophobic segment of our population, wrote SONGS about her!
Obama may swagger about, threatening to bomb Tehran, but he knows that if he starts bombing
Neda's family we will march on Washington and burn down the Capitol building. And if he gets his lap dogs in Israel to do it one more time, that will be the end of America's post-Holocaust love affair with the Israelis.
We do what we think is to our benefit. Religious altruism, and I have made this argument many times in the past, is not done because they want to help. It is also done because to them, it also curries favours with their respective deity of choice. So in a way, it is forced.
But in this case religion is merely reinforcing our Stone Age
instinct to help each other so we all prosper.
As we scrambled to keep her alive and care for her, she looked me in the eyes and told me that I would be blessed for helping her, that God would repay me for this. She thought she was dying, we all thought she was dying. But that kind of thing is ingrained. I was helping her because she is my mother and I did not want her to die and also because as a fellow human being, one does not just sit idly by and let someone suffer like that. When she was stabilised in the hospital and able to speak coherently, I would spend every moment of visiting hours with her. It was a terrible scare. And she kept telling me that God would repay me for my kindness in helping her and my father and her family overseas through the double tragedy it had just suffered.
It's been well established that prayer releases endorphins--in both the pray-er and (often) the pray-ee. Don't knock it.
I know my mother and I have seen her do some extraordinary things for complete strangers and it's not because she thinks it will help her get into heaven. But when it came to me helping her during that devastating evening and in the weeks following, for some reason, she thought I would be blessed for it.
Isn't it nice to be blessed for something that you would have done anyway? Kinda identifies you as a really
good person, wouldn't you say?
One of the things that many people have forgotten is that the women's liberation movement were started by religious women.
Sure, but so was Prohibition. Everybody's right sometimes and wrong other times.
The organizers of the conference, the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF)—the organization started by the person who first introduced me to skepticism—allowed the man to attend the conference and did nothing to reassure me.
Bummer. We were members of CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims Of the Paranormal), Randi's first organization, back in the early 1980s. We saw him speak many times. He did a lot of good work, especially the unmasking of Peter Popoff, a so-called "faith healer" who (like most charlatans) used the techniques of stage magicians to fool his audience.
But even then, Randi was on the ropes. He had to sever his connection with CSICOP when a religious organization sued him and threatened to bankrupt him and the organization. We found it amusing that the palmists, astrologers, Tarot readers, etc., never confronted Randi, even though the majority of them actually do try honestly to help people, simply pretending to use tools and techniques that their clients trust when in fact they're just very good amateur psychotherapists--often better than the pros.
I guess it is different in the US.
I'll let someone else respond to that, since I'm not really a member of the "atheist community." I discuss atheism and religion more in one day here in the silicon universe than in a whole year out in the carbon universe.
I suppose it's also worth mentioning, in terms of the long history of European antisemitism, that Torquemada was Jewish.
Torquemada had a Jewish grandmother. (That's enough for Hitler, since he required only 25% Jewish "blood"--which would have made me Jewish and explains why my parents waited until the 1960s, when they were finally sure that the Nazis were not going to occupy America, to let me know that Grandpa's immigrant parents were Jewish converts to the Episcopal church.) And it would be enough for the Jews themselves, if it was his maternal grandmother, since "Jewishness" is matrilineal.
But it was not a deal-breaker for the Christians of that day. They were happy for Jews to convert and didn't hold their ancestry against them.
They are lucky. They don't want for anything and what they need, they have. They need to have that level of feet on the ground and not feel that sense of entitlement so many kids have nowdays. I just hope it sticks.
