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I think morality comes from the Bible as much law is based on the 10 commandments, but also that we use the Bible to enforce or support our view of morality. It is not one or the other but both. There are billions of humans and they try out things all the time. So it is the perfect world for witnesses to see the wisdom playout between the battle of light and darkness. As we humans are impartial to the celestial war, we play out the wisdom of both sides and the fruit can be judged.
So yes, many people already have a their own standard of morality and will use the Bible and any other example to prove they are right.
But I’m not suggesting some get their morality from who knows where and then insert the bible. I’m suggesting this is normally how it’s done. I feel if you lived a few hundred years ago you would be living in a time when corporeal punishment was more common and therefore would be explaining how utterly obvious it is that the right and moral thing to do is to beat your son to remove or purge evil from him.
I’m also not sure much law is based on the 10 commandments. No one puts the sabbath law into their laws. They pick the things that are obvious and reasonable. And cultures had similar laws before. People understand that murdering is morally wrong. It would be morally wrong even if God hadnt have put it down. (Rape isn’t really in the law as bad yet we can reason out that it is morally wrong for the same reasons murder is.).
Terrarica, a guy named Stanley Milgram did an experiment which has been repeated over the decades with the same results. It showed that 55-65% of people will actually kill a stranger if an authority figure tells them to. (They feel absolved of responsibility because of the authority figure). You should google the Milgram experiment. Or watch clips of the original footage. It’s the most disturbing experiment I can imagine with results that are hard to believe. Most of society is made up of unthinking masses that succumb to social forces and conformity and authority.
For fun also see the ash experiments.
David.
So does our morality come from the bible? Or do we just use the bible to justify our present day morality?
I am not opposed to physical discipline as do a number of people. I scoff at “scientific” reports that say it is bad for a child to receive physical discipline because I have received it with no harm done and perhaps wisdom gained, though I am hard headed. I also received abuse so I am aware of the difference.
You are asking if people who live by their flesh have a moral code based on the Law. They certainly do not have a morality based on the Spirit as they do not bear that fruit. People that live by their flesh have been misinterpreting Scripture as long as their has been Scripture.
hi david
Terrarica, a guy named Stanley Milgram did an experiment which has been repeated over the decades with the same results. It showed that 55-65% of people will actually kill a stranger if an authority figure tells them to. (They feel absolved of responsibility because of the authority figure). You should google the Milgram experiment. Or watch clips of the original footage. It’s the most disturbing experiment I can imagine with results that are hard to believe. Most of society is made up of unthinking masses that succumb to social forces and conformity and authority.
Ge 6:5 The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.
Mt 27:20 But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus executed.
Lk 23:23 But with loud shouts they insistently demanded that he be crucified, and their shouts prevailed.
Jn 18:40 They shouted back, “No, not him! Give us Barabbas!” Now Barabbas had taken part in a rebellion.Jn 3:19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.
Jn 3:20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
Jn 3:21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”to my understanding it is all related to the individual that makes a choice ,a choice made according to his very own ways and believes at the momment of the time,
Ac 2:36 “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom YOU crucified, both Lord
and Christ.”IF SOMEONE WANT TO SUPPORT FALSE RELIGION IN STEAD OF Christ what can anyone do ? nothing beside talk to him and show him how wrong it is ,
As we speak of slavery don’t speak of how we treat our children.
We must not save the rod and break our children. This is a new thing today, to break down respect for the elders.
Children have become very proud,and haughty,and loose.
The real true slavery are those children made to work long hours for peanuts.
Not only children; grown ups as well.
They are the poor and oppressed. God will bless them; and they will be the oppressors
of them that oppress them.
wakeup.
This is why God sent his Son to give the light.
Every man’s morals are according to his own culture, or way of thinking, using his own reasoning for justification.The Western world did borrow a few of God’s commandments, and used it as law, but those who made the laws, abused their own laws by starting wars and murdering the innocent. They continually broke their own laws. They envied, they coveted, they stole, they lied, they did not put God first etc etc.
This probably does not answer your question David, but I am just pointing out that the only true morals we can observe are the ones Christ set out for us in the NT.
Every other culture have some good and some bad mixed in there.
What we consider bad, they consider “just” according to their law,
and the only way to tell the difference is to know the scriptures where there is light, and have one set of ethics for all – God’s ethics, trusted, true and just.
There can be no arguments then.For man using his own judgement and discernment without the Word of God involved, remains terribly far from God.
I’m saying we, we all, everyone on here, begins with their own morality and then overlays the bible on top.
Example: proverbs 20:30.
A thousand years ago when it was way more common to beat children and whip them and hit them with sticks as “discipline” you would likely have believed as most people around you: that it is moral to beat your son with a literal Rod and that as proverbs 20:30 says, the blueness of wounds purge the body of evil. You would have started with the morality you were brought up with or the morality of society around you or some combination of the two and then when reading those verses would have literally applied them and beat your son until the blueness of his wounds removed the wicked ways from him.
Today you start with a different morality and that is: hitting is generally wrong. So, on coming to these same verses, we find ways of twisting them into something metaphorical to Match our present day morality.
Here is my point: if we (if you and I and everyone) get out morality from the bible then the idea about beating children wouldn’t change one bit for you or I. We would still beat our sons with rods on the back. If our morality changes while the bible does not then we do not really get our morality from the bible. We just use it to justify whatever morality is popular or that we prefer.
WAKEUP, this is maybe off point and meant for another place but the bible nowhere commands men to “spank” their children. Meaning hands on the buttocks. Rather it repeatedly talks about rods (large wooden poles). It uses the word “beat.” Sort of like how Paul was beat with a rod 5 times. (People were in fact beaten with rods back then. This literally happened in our very violent past). So, if you use the bible to defend your corporeal punishment my question is: what gives you the right to change it from beating with a rod to spanking? If you are going to say those scriptures are at all literal then why do you not literally carry them out? Is it because our morality has changed? Or is it because you are filing with your own morality and trying to make the bible Match up with what you want to do?
(On a side note, its possible we have the causation backwards. Studies show at hitting children causes aggression. I know if someone hit me, even once I am going to get aggresive. If this was repeated I know pretty well that 10 years down the line I am going to be more aggresive not less. This in fact is what studies show. I know you think we don’t hit kids now but looking at the U.S., it’s insane how much kids are hit and spanked and abused. It’s no wonder they act as they do. Hitting increases rate of mental illness, drinking, drug use, lowers IQ, it affects the brain. While it produces short term compliance it produces mid to long term badness. If you hit a dog every week for a year that dog is going to be messed up, aggresive, have all sorts of issues. And the person who has that dog and is hitting it mistakenly thinks that by hitting it it is somehow going to fix the behavioural problem. They never look in e mirror or at studies. They simply repeat the abuse they were modelled as children. In countries that have the lowest corporeal punishment they have the highest IQ. It’s mostly because rather than hitting the parents use reason and so the child learns how to think rather than how to blindly obey out of fear. Anyway this is all off topic but I’ve been studying this for a few years and am sort of disgusted by how little people want to think about this topic. It’s just so much easier to hit.
I am not opposed to physical discipline as do a number of people. I scoff at “scientific” reports that say it is bad for a child to receive physical discipline because I have received it with no harm done and perhaps wisdom gained, though I am hard headed. I also received abuse so I am aware of the difference.
So, you are using anecdotal evidence. This would be like me saying: “I scoff at the idea that coins land heads 50% of the time as studies suggest because I flipped a coin twice in my life and both times were tails.” This is silly of course. Anecdotal evidence isn’t evidence. It’s the opposite of evidence. And even if you did turn out fine, we have nothing to compare it to because we don’t know how much better you would have turned out had you not been hit. I know people that are totally not fine who say the exact same thing. A smoker may say: “I’m 90 and I smoked every day and haven’t died.” This is no proof that smoking isn’t extrmely harmful. Not every person who smokes dies of lung cancer. But enough do so that smart people know it’s not a great idea.
When you say “no harm done” I wonder what that means. Understnd that hitting only increases the chances of aggression. It only increases the chances of depression and other mental disorders. It even increases the chances of promiscuity and cancer and diabetes. So like that smoker who is 90 and hasn’t died, you might be right. But for every smoker who lives to 90, how many get lung cancer.
In the past wives were disciplined as well and people somehow used the bible to support this. Slaves were disciplined, wives were disciplined and children were disciplined. We have sorted out that the first two are morally wrong. The world is slowly figuring out the third one. Don’t be the last person who was suggesting that hitting slaves was a good idea.
(It was legal to beat your wife in the US until 1920 I believe. Wife beating used to be extremely common and legal pretty much everywhere (except ancient Egypt). It was just normal. Women were owned as property. Now it’s morally outrageous. If we lived back then we would sympathize with the men who beat wives and perhaps hit the wives ourselves. (Unless we were intellectually and morally honest with ourselves and ahead of our time). I suggest we be that way now towards children.
David,
o, you are using anecdotal evidence. This would be like me saying: “I scoff at the idea that coins land heads 50% of the time as studies suggest because I flipped a coin twice in my life and both times were tails
I scoff because frankly most studies I use either or both use bad logical reasoning or bad scientific methodology. Hard sciences are usually but the soft sciences are often a joke filled with thee opinions of man. Human beings are not reliable researchers as they are too subject to human error. So quite frankly I consider personal anecdotal evidence more reliable as I have control over the factors. You choose to put you faith in men you know nothing about.
One way researchers could bias their results is to include reports from obviously abused children in with those that have been merely disciplined. Scriptures tell us there is a difference. One that is common is such studies is to small of a group or a group that is not diverse enough. You are also hoping the interviewed individual remember correctly and choose to respond correctly, i.e. it involves polling. It statistics which has been lumped in with lies and damned lies. It is almost an art instead of a science.
By the way here is a study that actually found mild or moderate discipline had not effect and even they tossed in cased that I would labeled as abuse instead of discipline. Hitting a child in the face is not discipline nor it poor self control.
I read further and actually did control for the abusive group and found that most of the correlation between spanking and long term harm went with them.
This group of parents, identified in the “red zone” for “stop” was removed from the sample at the first stage of analysis. With them went most of the correlations initially found between spanking and long-term harm to children, said Baumrind.
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2001/08/24_spank.html
Kerwin, we are getting off track quite a bit but:
“I am not an advocate of spanking,” said Baumrind, “but a blanket injunction against its use is not warranted by the evidence. It is RELIANCE ON PHYSICAL PUNISHMENT, not whether or not it is used at all, THAT IS ASSOCIATED WITH HARM TO THE CHILD.”–the researcher.
“It is reliance on physical punishment …that is associated with harm to the child.”
And do people who spank or hit do this once or for a month and then quite or do they rely on this method for years as a primary method?
They rely on them. It lasts for years. The amount of children being hit weekly or even daily and repeatedly daily, is high.
I would also like to point out that if we want society’s crime to drop massively, we stop treating children as aggressively. 90% of violent crime and 60% of overall crime is committed by sociopaths who seem to have dark regions in the brain where self control and empathy should be lighting up. It seems that certain genes are triggered by abuse and aggression at an early age. Just like circumcision rewired the brain’s pain sensors and later in life the circumcised individual is more sensitive to pain, so too the brain seems or be rewired by early childhood trauma or even aggression. Almost all studies show that the more aggression and the longer it lasts the more severe the outcome.
Relying on physical punishment harms the child. I agree with your researcher on this.
“The group of parents, identified in the “red zone” for “stop” was removed from the sample at the first stage of analysis. With them went most of the correlations initially found between spanking and long-term harm to children, said Baumrind.
“When we removed this ‘red zone’ group of parents,” said Baumrind, “we were left with very few small but significant correlations between normative physical punishment and later misbehavior among the children at age 8 to 9.”Yes, most of the correlations between physical punishment and harm were with the abusive people who clearly went too far. As would be expected. But there still are “significant correlations between normative physical punishment and later misbehavior. ”
It feels obvious that the harder and longer the hitting, the more problems later. Part of the problem is, when spanking is viewed as normal or moral, guess what it allows these abusive parents who were going way too far to do? They just think they are doing what others are doing, and that its normal and therefore justified. If it was viewed as wholly unjust and immoral then these ones who are abusing their precious children would at least flinch or pause before doing what they believe is okay.“What really matters,” said Baumrind, “is the child rearing context. When parents are loving and firm and communicate well with the child (a pattern Baumrind calls authoritative) the children are exceptionally competent and well adjusted, whether or not their parents spanked them as preschoolers.”
Baumrind emphasized that her study does not address at all the damaging effects of abusive physical punishment, of which she and other researchers have found ample evidence.”The problem is that people who have guns have little need to be communicative. When in your tool belt is violence, you aren’t going to try as much to communicate as to reason.
An extremes analogy is if a sociopath decides to take a girl out on a date and plans on having sex with or raping here then he won’t make much of an effort to use reason or charm. Similarly if a parent is pretending to use reason and morality but in the end is just going to hit the child to get the behavior he wants the child anyway, won’t the child get that creepy vibe off the parent. Won’t he think: “you are pretending like you are trying to reason with me but in the end you are just going to hit me.”Once again:
“Baumrind emphasized that her study does not address at ALL THE DAMAGING EFFECTS of abusive physical punishment, of which SHE and OTHER RESEARCHERS HAVE FOUND AMPLE EVIDENCE.”Let’s say that hitting wives was still considered discipline. Many people in the 1700s and 1800′ s believed there was a rule of thumb where the hitting stick couldn’t be thicker than your thumb.
Let’s imagine you and I speaking back then. You might rightly say: “they and rent and rents effected by depression or mental problems if you only hit them the right way or not too often.” And then I say: “yes but the very thought of it being partially okay is what gives many very abusive men the belief that what they are doing is normal or okay.” And you say: “this study shows that if you take out all the most violent red zone parents then the effects on children aren’t that bad.” And I say: “people in the future will think you were sort of a horrible person.”
When we hit slaves it was normal and we made excuses. When we hit wives legally and at a much higher rate than today we had our reasonings. They needed discipline we said. They were lazy or whatever. Whatever the reasons, they existed.
Today most of the world still hits children. Many hit toddlers. Many hit 6 month Olds. This exists because it’s socially normal to spank.Kerwin,
I also find it remarkable that you believe anecdotal evidence is more worthy than studies or research. It’s true you can find a study on only 8 people in Africa on green coffee bean that shows it has weight loss effects and that one study probably should be thrown in the garbage if it’s the only one. But if you combine a lot of studies or look at meta studies or look at who is conducting e study and what they have to gain, they have to be more reliable an one person. Everyone has biases even you. Looking at large groups of numbers and many of them is a good way to weed out the biases. You can always find 2% of a group that goes against the trend or has weird conspiracy type of results. But generally if there is a co census in a field they tend to be right. It just seems so odd to me that you would think anecdotal evidence is evidence at all, given how prone people are to self deception and cognitive illusions and cognitive distortions and bad at math and misunderstand probability and misremember details and mentally filter out details and …..
Everyone always believes they are right about everything for a variety of reasons. They even believe they are right if they were tricked into believing they believe something they don’t. (Choice blindness studies). So anecdotes are a great way for a person to deceive themself into believing what they want to beleve by mentally filtering out anything that doesn’t fit with the comforting belief they are aiming for.Kerwin,
Your anecdotal evidence is that you were hit and with no harm done.
1. You are comparing your present self with an imaginary you that never existed. It’s a comparison that is impossible to compare. You have no idea how you were effected.
2. Hitting only increases the chances of these things and doesn’t guarantee them. Again, a smoker may make the same argument since not all smokers get lung cancer. Yet I believe you would agree that smoking is harmful even if one smoker can make an anecdotal claim that he wasn’t harmed.
3. It doesn’t matter if you were fine with it. It also doesn’t matter if a wife is fine with being hit or if a slave is fine with being beaten. What matters is if it is moral or not. Or if it’s logical or not. A slave might and has said that he likes slavery. Yet that doesn’t make it okay. Again, this is a comoarison with only one data point. Hence pointless.
My first post KERWIN was me going through the link quoting from it and discussing it. I think I quoted from it about 6 times.
Kerwin,
I take it you didn’t read the first paragraph of what I wrote. That was a quote from your article. And then I quote it a few more times.David,
My first post KERWIN was me going through the link quoting from it and discussing it. I think I quoted from it about 6 times.
I was tired when I posted and seemed to be more inattentive that usual so thank you for letting me know. My link is not the best source but I think it is fairly good being a news article from Berkley itself. I plan to go over what you wrote. Thank you for your time and patience.
David,
“It is reliance on physical punishment …that is associated with harm to the child.”
What one man calls reliance another man does not. It is not a scientific word because it is subject to judgment. Our language is not the best for expressing scientific ideas because of many words subject to judgement.
A small minority of parents, from 4 to 7 percent depending on the time period, used physical punishment often and with some intensity. Although these parents were not legally abusive, they were overly severe and used spanking impulsively. Hitting occurred frequently, but it was the intensity that really identified this group, said Baumrind.
This sounds like the red group which is the source of most of the correlation. I have no idea of what overly severe means but if his word is comparative to what Scripture states then they are certainly not moderate in all things which considering the percentage involved is probably correct. Now the “impulsive” sounds like thee individuals in this group have impulse control issues which brings in the factor of genetics. I see no evidence that genetics was controlled for. I will address this with sociopaths/psychopath which are two equivalent groups of symptoms with different causes.
Also we are told:
She said intensity was rated high if the parent said he or she used a paddle or other instrument to strike the child, or hit on the face or torso, or lifted to throw or shake the child.
So the assumption made by these researches is that using a paddle on the but was equivalent to striking a child in the face or lifting to throw or shaking the child. Shaking a small child can cause brain damage while hitting them with a paddle on the behind doesn’t cause. That group should be separated to see what correlation there is, if any.
This I found interesting:
Studies of verbal punishment yielded similar results, in that researchers found correlations just as high, and sometimes higher, for total verbal punishment and harm to the child, as for total physical punishment and harm.
Again the genetics vs nurture controversy comes into play.
Over all it is not telling us anything that has not been known for a long time and it need more work at refine these preliminary results and test them. They were not testing to see of the child ended up spoiled or not so we do not know if sparing the rod spoiled the child or not.
Here is what Baumrind states:
“I am not an advocate of spanking,” said Baumrind, “but a blanket injunction against its use is not warranted by the evidence. It is reliance on physical punishment, not whether or not it is used at all, that is associated with harm to the child.”
“What really matters,” said Baumrind, “is the child rearing context. When parents are loving and firm and communicate well with the child (a pattern Baumrind calls authoritative) the children are exceptionally competent and well adjusted, whether or not their parents spanked them as preschoolers.”
Her definition of reliance seems to be excessive and/or impulsive negative discipline whether it is administered verbally or physically.
David,
Sociopath and Psychopath are now said to be individuals suffering with antisocial personality disorder and one of the possible cause it the mores of our western society. traumatic events, and genetics, as well as other things are possible factors. Wikipedia has an article if you are interested.
I venture to say that if a child develops in a stressful environment and is brought believe that acting out antisocial ways is acceptable, parental example, then they have a higher chance of developing an antisocial personality disorder.
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