commandments

Stage 1 – Obedience and Punishment The earliest stage of moral development is especially common in young children, but adults are also capable of expressing this type of reasoning. At this stage, children see rules as fixed and absolute. Obeying the rules is important because it is a means to avoid punishment. ((http://psychology.about.com/od/developmentalpsychology/a/kohlberg.htm))

Biblical teaching cannot easily be harmonized with the content of Kohlberg‘s theory, especially his hierarchy of moral reasoning which considers self-interested pursuit of reward, avoidance of punishment, and seeking to please God as lower, relatively inferior forms of moral reasoning. The Christian Scriptures present people with a broad spectrum of valid reasons for doing what…

High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week. Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of…

Stories employed to legitimate the mechanisms of social control. Thus, for example, when parents tell their children, "We only want to help you avoid our mistakes," they are constructing a metanarrative that justifies the imposition of rules of conduct they are unwilling to follow themselves. Lyotard supposed that the deliberate subversion of prominent metanarratives is…

For far too long priests and preachers have completely ignored the vicious criminal acts that the Bible promotes. The so called “God” of the Bible… is directly responsible for many mass-murders, rapes, pillage, plunder, slavery, child abuse and killing, not to mention the killing of unborn children. I have included references to the Biblical passages,…