So, what are the beautiful and good values in religion? “You shall not kill”<\/font>, “You shall not steal”<\/font>, “Honour thy father and thy mother”<\/font>, etc. – certainly excellent values. But there are quite a few additional gems hidden in the religious Jewish texts, such as in the “Talmud”. For example: “Whoever takes one soul, it is as if he took an entire world; and whoever saves one soul, it is as if he saved an entire world”<\/font>, “No one is permitted to take an animal or a bird unless he has prepared food for them”<\/font>, and so on and so forth. Even the laws of the Hebrew slave, given that there are “slaves,” were extremely enlightened for the time they were written.<\/p>\n A segment of the Israeli Declaration of Independence<\/p>\n You will rarely hear from religious preachers about the “bad” things in religion, and even then – in most cases – with elaborate explanations about the supposedly hidden goodness in them. Yet, anyone who is deeply familiar with the contents of the religious texts – knows that they are filled not only with “Thou shalt not kill”, but also with large amounts of stupidity, horror and pornography. For example: It is not considered a problem to have sex with a female baby under the age of three; It is forbidden to help a non-Jewish woman to give birth on the Sabbath; A woman must serve her husband and is not smart enough to learn; There is a command to kill “infidels”; Freedom of study, thought and expression – are forbidden; And so on and so forth (and much more). Even good values – such as a weekly day of rest – have degenerated into ridiculous commands such as the prohibition of tearing up toilet paper on the Sabbath. Passover – the “Holiday of Freedom” – has long since become a holiday of slavery for religious believers. And of course there are all the blunt and harsh commands against “gentiles”, against LGBT people, against anyone who “did not please” the ancient legislators.<\/p>\n We will not elaborate on this here, but the “true” believers (and the religious texts themselves) clearly explain that we should not look for any reasons for “good” and “bad” (or rational reasons in general) in religious commandments. The rule is simple – God wants it this way<\/b>, and that is it. This is the only reason that should interest us. In several Jewish religious texts it is explained that the point is not the impossibility of doing various things, but rather the command from God not to do them, and we are not allowed to discuss the reasons. This is also roughly the teaching of the “Leibowitz” school of Judaism: “Keeping the commandments” IS<\/b> the value, and not necessarily the content of the commandments.<\/p>\n The important point is that you don’t need religion<\/b> to believe in values like “Thou shalt not kill”, “Thou shalt not steal”, and the like. These exist in every culture and every human religion in various ways (and are actually imprinted in our brains evolutionarily). In fact, you won’t find any worthy “value” in religion that doesn’t exist without religion. Good values that exist in religion – exist without religion. Bad values that exist in religion – exist only in religion.<\/b><\/font><\/p>\n And all this for a very simple reason. The so-called “values” of religion – are observed by its believers because of an external<\/b> command. For some of them, it is because of fear of heavenly punishment, for others – because of respect for that unknown being. Neither the former nor the latter is related to the content of the performed command. On the other hand, “non-religious” people who believe in and promote a certain value – do so because of their free thinking and their own conscience, and because of the content of what they perform – and this is the truer definition of “value”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We hear this phrase day and night. Religious people talk about it constantly, and the thing that is a little surprising – many secular people also talk about it: “There are good values in religion”. If you love good values so much, and there are some in religion – then why aren’t you “religious”? As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,7,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-god","category-judaism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetruthiswrong.com\/indeed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetruthiswrong.com\/indeed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetruthiswrong.com\/indeed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetruthiswrong.com\/indeed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetruthiswrong.com\/indeed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=905"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thetruthiswrong.com\/indeed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":909,"href":"https:\/\/thetruthiswrong.com\/indeed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905\/revisions\/909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetruthiswrong.com\/indeed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetruthiswrong.com\/indeed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetruthiswrong.com\/indeed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/hofesh.org.il\/articles\/moral\/religious_values\/declaration-of-independence.jpg\")
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