Biblical morality is plainly wrong on the topics of slavery, homosexuality, and women’s rights and has literally nothing useful to say about such modern moral questions as climate change, animal welfare, genetic engineering, wealth distribution, artificial intelligence, and any other post-Stone Aged topic. Many people recognize the failure of faith-based morality but do not know where to turn. 

 

If you are like me, just because you do not believe in imaginary beings, does not mean that morality is not important to you. This is sadly something lost on most American Christians, who think that they alone hold the keys to right and wrong. 

 

Arguably the best modern moral philosophies comprise some version of utilitarianism and virtue ethics. Simply put, someone is moral if they desire to act in a way that maximally increases the well-being or decreases the harm experienced by conscious beings. 

 

Moral philosophers can argue for days over isolated cases at the extremes where specific moral ideas break down, but day to day, this approach seems to serve very well for answering real-world moral issue. It is a far better alternative to saying ‘whatever God says is right.’ There are countless examples, but I’ll provide two: 

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1. Should gay marriage be legal? Biblically, that’s a hard ‘No’ based on both the Old Testament and New Testament. From a modern moral standpoint, affording two homosexual people that love one another the same rights and benefits as anyone two heterosexual people that love one another will increase the overall well-being of conscious creatures, thus it is moral to allow gay marriage. 

2. Should a mother who killed her baby because she was in a state of post-partum psychosis be put to death? Obviously, one could argue the ‘eye for an eye’ verse applies, and if that’s the case, then Biblical morality is again shown to be a simple set of rules that can change based on however one interprets the Bible. But what about the woman’s capacity to know that what she was doing is wrong? Where are the Bible verses about mental health or culpability during psychosis? As with all issues of Biblical morality, there are Christians that will project their own moral ideas onto excerpts from the Bible, but there is nothing that actually addresses this issue in the Bible—no stories, no verses, no principles. From a modern moral standpoint, there are more questions to be asked, such as prognosis, likelihood of recurrence, etc., but with each of these appropriately addressed, a case can certainly be made using modern moral principles that the death penalty in this case is not appropriate. Modern ethical theories also raise questions about the death penalty in any case, whereas the Bible would indicate payback for any death.