Biblical Ethics

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion pp. 245-246
The rival god Baal seems to have been a perennially seductive tempter to wayward worship. In Numbers, chapter 25, many of the Israelites were lured by Moabite women to sacrifice to Baal. God reacted with characteristic fury. He ordered Moses to 'Take all the heads of the people and hang them up before the Lord against the sun, that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel.' One cannot help, yet again, marvelling at the extraordinarily draconian view taken of the sin of flirting with rival gods. To our modern sense of values and justice it seems a trifling sin compared to, say, offering your daughter for a gang rape. It is yet another example of the disconnect between scriptural and modern (one is tempted to say civilized) morals. Of course, it is easily enough understood in terms of the theory of memes, and the qualities that a deity needs in order to survive in the meme pool.

Martin Buber, The Words on the Tablets
...The publication and translation of Egyptian and Babylonian texts led to the dissemination of information regarding, and to appreciation of, a reality in the history of the human mind which has received the name of the "ancient Oriental moral code," but which might rather be regarded as the ancient Oriental tendency to commingle cultic prohibitions and postulates with those of a moral kind. In those texts which have become best known and are also most characteristic a confession of the dead before the judges of the dead found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead (deriving from the period in which the Exodus from Egypt took place), and a "catalogue of sins" from the Babylonian conjuration tab- lets the moral part is the greater by far; and this fact is quite sufficient in itself to break down the general assumption that cult necessarily preceded ethics. But even if we turn our attention to the so-called primitive races and read, say, the tribal lore of an East African tribe, which the elders pass on to adoles cents about to be admitted into the community, we observe that their real concern is with the correct relations between the members of a family, the members of a clan; there is, furthermore, the important fact of the repeated stressing that this is the will of the god, of the "Heaven Man." The most thorough- going opponents of a Mosaic origin for the decalogue therefore no longer reject the possibility that Moses may have proclaimed moral commandments such as those to be found in the decalogue. "The moral commandments of the decalogue," says one of these opponents, "belong to those basic laws with which even the most primitive of societies cannot dispense."

The God Delusion pp. 225-226
...Hauser also wondered whether religious people differ from atheists in their moral intuitions. Surely, if we get our morality from religion, they should differ. But it seems that they don't. Hauser, working with the moral philosopher Peter Singer, focused on three hypothetical dilemmas and compared the verdicts of atheists with those of religious people. In each case, the subjects were asked to choose whether a hypothetical action is morally 'obligatory', 'permissible' or 'forbidden'. The three dilemmas were:
1 Denise's dilemma. Ninety per cent of people said it was permissible to divert the trolley, killing the one to save the five.
2 You see a child drowning in a pond and there is no other help in sight. You can save the child, but your trousers will be ruined in the process. Ninety-seven per cent agreed that you should save the child (amazingly, 3 per cent apparently would prefer to save their trousers).
3 The organ transplant dilemma described above. Ninety-seven per cent of subjects agreed that it is morally forbidden to seize the healthy person in the waiting-room and kill him for his organs, thereby saving five other people.
The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer's study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgements. This seems compatible with the view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God in order to be good - or evil.

Martin Buber, What Are We To Do About The Ten Commandments?
The Ten Commandments are not part of an impersonal codex governing an association of men. They were uttered by an I and addressed to a Thom They begin with the I and every one of them address. the Thou in person. And "commands" and a Thou—every Thou who hears this Thou—"is commanded" In the Decalogue, the word of Him who issues commands is equipped with no executive power effective on the plane of predictable causality. The word does not enforce its own hearing. Whoever does not wish to respond to the Thou addressed to him can apparently go about his business un-impeded. Though He who speaks the word has power (and the Decalogue presupposes that He had sufficient power to create the heavens and the earth), He has renounced this power of His sufficiently to kt every individual actually decide for himself whether he wants to open or close his ears to the voice, and that mesas whether he wants to choose or reject the I of "I am." He who rejects Him is not struck down by lighting; he who elects Him does not find hidden treasures. Everything seems to remain just as it was...
God does not wish to dispense either medals or prison sentences. This, then, is the situation in which "faith" finds itself. According to all criteria of predictable causality, the hearing of what there is to hear does not pay. Faith in not a mere business enterprise which involves risk balanced by the possibility of incalculable gain; it is the venture pure and simple, a venture that transcends the law of probability. This holds especially for those hardened believers whose idea about death and what comes after death is that it will all be revealed in due time, but cannot be anticipated by the imagination—not even by "religious" imagination. Now human society, and by that I mean the living community at any definite period, as far as we can recognize the existence of a common will in its institutions, has at all times had an interest in fostering and keeping the Ten Commandments. It has been, to be sure, less interested in those commandments that refer to the relationship to God, but it certainly wants the rest to be kept, because it would not be conducive to the welfare of society if murder, for example, ceased to be a crime and became a vice. To a certain extent this holds even for the prohibition against adultery, at least as long as society believes that it cannot get along without marriage, and indeed it never has gotten along without it, not even in its "primitive" stages of polyandry and polygamy. And as long as society cares about maintaining the commotion between generations and transmitting forms and contents in a well-regulated manner, it must respect the command to honor one's parents.
It is understandable that society does not want to base so vital a matter on to insecure a foundation as faith—on wanting or not wanting to hear. So, society has always endeavored to transfer those commands and prohibitions it considered important from the sphere of "religion" to that of morals, to translate them from the language that uses the personal imperative to the impersonal formulation of "musts." Society wishes these commandments to be upheld by public opinion, which can to a certain extent be con-trolled, rather than by the will of God whose effectiveness cannot be predicted or counted on. But since even the security of opinion is not entirely dependable, the commands and prohibitions are once more transferred, this time to the sphere of "law," i.e., they are translated into the language of if-formulations: "If someone should do this or that, then such-and-such a thing shall be done to him." And the punishment
such-and-such a thing shall be done to him." And the purpose of the threat of "such-and-such a thing" is not to limit the freedom of action of the law-breaker, but to punish him. God scorned to regulate the relation between what a man does and what, as a result of his doing, is done to him, by exact mathematical rules, but that is exactly what society attempts. To be sure, society certainly hear the personnel to carry out its rulings, a personnel which, at least in principle, has well-defined work to perform: the courts, the police, jailers, and hangmen. Oddly enough, however, the result is still tar from satisfactory. Statistics, for example, do not show that the death penalty has had the effect of diminishing the number of murders.