If you found a verse in your own holy book that you knew was morally wrong, would you keep your faith?

• A

  Avery2d ago

  Here's the uncomfortable flip side for atheists: if morality is just your conscience, your conscience was also shaped by a culture that was shaped by these religions. You're judging the river with water from the same river.

  219Reply
• KR

  Kofi R.3d ago

  The moment you say 'that verse is wrong', you've just admitted you have a moral standard OUTSIDE the book that you're judging the book by. Which means the book was never your real source of morality. Your conscience was. That's the whole game.

  86Reply
• AL

  Avery L.2d ago

  The 'God's higher justice' card proves too much. By that logic NOTHING could ever count as evidence against God's goodness, because any horror gets reclassified as secretly good. An unfalsifiable goodness is indistinguishable from no goodness at all.

  73Reply
• T

  Theo3d ago

  Abrogation supposedly handles this in Islam — later verses override earlier ones. But that just means God changed his mind, which means the eternal unchanging word... changed. You can't have both 'timeless' and 'updated'.

  66Reply
• C

  Casey3d ago

  Context crowd, do your homework: 'keep the virgins for yourselves' has exactly one realistic meaning to a victorious ancient army and it isn't adoption. Stop laundering it.

  65Reply
• JK

  Jordan K.3d ago

  I'd keep my faith and reject the verse, openly. God is bigger than a book some Bronze Age scribe attributed to him. If that makes me a heretic, the heretics in history were usually the ones who turned out right.

  61Reply
• FB

  Feli B.3d ago

  As a Jew, we don't read these as God's instruction manual for today — they're our ancestors' brutal ancient war records, preserved honestly, warts and all. The dishonest thing is a religion that pretends its scripture is spotless. Ours isn't and we say so.

  59Reply
• R

  Riley2d ago

  Kept my faith, dropped the literalism. I decided the sacred part is the wrestling with the text, not swallowing it. Jacob wrestled the angel and got renamed for it. Maybe that's the actual instruction.

  35Reply
• T

  Taylor3d ago

  Or it means I trust the Author's full justice over my limited 30-year-old understanding of an ancient war. Humility says maybe I'm the one missing context, not that God is wrong.

  33Reply
• A

  Alex2d ago

  Trust your conscience. Every single time. The people who overrode their conscience for scripture gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition, and a guy flying a plane into a building convinced he'd read the right verses.

  26Reply
• S

  Sam3d ago

  That 'humility' is how every atrocity in scripture gets a pass. 'I don't understand how genocide is good, but surely God does.' You've trained yourself to distrust your own horror at murdered children. That's not humility, that's self-lobotomy.

  22Reply
• NL

  Nina L.2d ago

  Genuinely respect that more than the contortionists. 'This verse is wrong and I still believe in God' is at least honest. 'This verse is secretly good if you squint' is the cowardly version.

  16Reply
• I

  Iris2d ago

  Partly true, but conscience also recoils at things scripture endorses — slavery, child-bride passages, genocide. If it were purely downstream of the text it wouldn't fight the text. It does. So it has another source.

  7Reply
• J

  Jamie3d ago

  Numbers 31 is the one that ended it for me. I was a Sunday school teacher. A kid asked why God let them keep the girls. I gave the rehearsed answer and heard, for the first time, how monstrous it sounded out loud. I left within a year.

  3Reply
• O

  Omar3d ago

  That's a far healthier relationship to a text than I ever had as an evangelical, where every word had to be defended like the whole building collapses if one brick is ugly.

  3Reply

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