Moral Innovators seek knowledge of our place in the world, so that we can do the right things and make the world a better place. One guide for doing the right things is The Golden Rule: Do unto others what you want others to do unto you. Make the world a better place requires innovations or continuous improvements, depending on our heart, skills and capabilities.
Seeking knowledge starts with our beliefs that we should try to confirm with facts or truths. There must be many more beliefs than knowledge because facts, or truths, remove only false beliefs, and cannot remove all beliefs. Truths or facts confirm beliefs, almost never create beliefs. We can deduce the earth rotates around the sun, contrary to the previous belief that the sun rotated around the earth, but that is a correction of belief, not a creation of belief.
Professor Bart Ehrman has many beliefs and lots of facts or truths. We can try to convert his facts on Christianity into knowledge by focusing on which beliefs can be confirmed and become knowledge. He started as a devoted Christian who spent most of his young life reading the Bible in multiple languages, seeking to find and understand the “original” version. The more he read, the less he himself became convinced of the Christianity faith, and became an agnostic in the 21st century. This is a breakdown of his claims to facts or truths that can be broken down into truths that can increase our knowledge of Christianity.
- Christianity claims that Jesus was, and is, God. However, this is not what the original disciples believed during Jesus’s lifetime, and it is not what Jesus claimed about himself.
- None of the original Bible documents of (either Old or New Testament) exist. The earliest text of the Bible had been copied many times, not a credible representation of the “original” version.
- His books highlight inconsistencies among existing Bible versions, specifically on the resurrection of Jesus, the timing of the death of Jesus, and when Jesus was declared “God” cannot be reconciled, unless the inconsistencies are ignored and remain “beliefs,” not knowledge.
- For 3.5 years Jesus preached an apocalyptic message of “love thy neighbor.” There are others like Jesus around his time, specifically Apollonius who was also resurrected and performed miracles as a contemporary of Jesus 2000 years ago.
Others, like FE Peters and Hans Kung, have also added inconsistencies:
- Who created God? Can God come out of nothing?
- Hans Kung, a Catholic clergy, claims that Frankish (i.e. French) clergy changed documents ~1,000 years ago within the Church to strengthen Pope’s power who ultimately became “Infallible.”
- FE Peters presented that The Jewish “midrash,” Christian “allegory,” and Muslim “kalam” all reflect attempts to interpret scripture into moral principles for believers. Specifically, Hellenistic philosophies were adsorbed onto all Abrahamic religions.
- The Black Sea deluge hypothesis between 2,600-2,800 years ago may explain the references to “the big flood” among Epic of Gilgamesh which predates the Bible, which predates the Quran.
- There is no archaeological evidence to support the Bible’s Exodus.
Faith, by definition, means we choose our personal relationship with God based on beliefs, not knowledge. Instead of battling at the belief level, we should respect the beliefs of others, while focus on productive dialogue for harmony within the realm of knowledge, not beliefs, by following The Golden Rule.
Moral Innovator 