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It is not as easy as a layman would guess to find out what Christian morals actually are. Despite what some religious folk claim, especially Christians and Muslims, it simply isn’t possible to have a “Book of Truth” that can be read objectively, with a share meaning agreed upon by everyone, especially when it comes to moral instruction and ethics. It is impossible to derive “absolute morals” from holy books like The Bible and The Qur’an. Unfortunately, because many religionists think that correct interpretation is of extreme importance, then, all these different possible conclusions lead to schism and the formation of competing denominations, often violently opposed to others who haven’t come to the same conclusions.

1. Language: When we read, our brains interpret the words according to our understanding of language. Prof. Loughlin warns about this when it comes to lawmaking. He says “language has an open-textured quality”, “there is an inherent vagueness in the ordinary use of language […] and, because of this, rules – even if we accept that they have a core of settled meaning – are often surrounded by a penumbra of uncertainty [… and] often acquire meaning within particular contexts”₂.
2. Subjectivism: Our own wild experiences in life, our own flawed understandings, both conspire continually to colour everything we see in the world. In epistemology, this basic fact is called subjectivism and the subjective nature of our perception of reality is one of the oldest topics in human philosophy, going back thousands of years₃.
   

   “Our brain is an imperfect organic machine, not a mystical repository of truth. Our senses are imperfect, our point of view limited, and the reality we experience is never the total picture. Human thought is infused with systematic thinking errors. We can logically deduce that any given experience may be untrue, and any particular thought could be a mistake. The result is that our total take on reality is a mix of guesses and patchwork. No two people ever experience the same event or thing in the same way, because the complexities and depths of their errors and assumptions are different for every person: every event is experienced slightly differently. No-one has precisely the same point of view on any event.”

   “Subjectivism and Phenomenology: Is Objective Truth Obtainable?: 5. The Conclusion: Subjectivism”
   Vexen Crabtree (2000)

3. Personal Bias: When people approach a religious text or any large book from which they intend to derive ethical teachings, nearly without exception the person will pick up the book and pay very particular attention to all the morals they already agree with. The philosopher George Smith says that “Christian theologians have a strong tendency to read their own moral convictions into the ethics of Jesus. Jesus is made to say what theologians think he should have said”₄. A homophobe will pick up the Christian Bible and realise that homosexuality is an evil sin. A misogynist will pick up the Bible or Qur’an and realise that after all this time he’s right: Women are inferior, and he can quote the Bible or Qur’an to prove it. A fluffy liberal will read it and find all the hippy love-thy-neighbour bits and therefore will be able to prove that all those homophobes and misogynists have it wrong. In arguing against extremism, Neil J. Kressel points out that “everyone picks and chooses, at least a little. Everyone interprets”₅.
4. Complexity and Contradictions: Long texts that dance with moral issues suffer from the problem that some morals in one place step on the toes of other morals in other parts. The debates over which verses have precedence over others is a major symptom of this issue. In addition because of the volume of text and its frequent obscurity and complexity, there is plenty of scope for the imagination, and for personal bias, to find a way to interpret lines in a way that beat to the drum of the reader. Because of the kaleidoscope of different plotlines and levels of possible interpretation, one’s subconscious and imagination is given accidental freedom to invent all kinds of morals.There is not a single moral “absolute” in the Bible that I cannot find a contradiction for in the very same book. For example, it is said by Bible believers that “do not steal” is an absolute moral found in the Bible, yet in the Bible we also find text where, under direct orders from God, people have stolen. There are serious and multifaceted contradictions between the OT and NT – some choose to get around this simply by ignoring Old Testament morals because they say they were overriden by the New Testament – but continue to use the bits that they like₆. Prof Dawkins does a good job of explaining why such disparaties can exist all within one book::
   

   “Much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living.”

   “The God Delusion” by Prof. Richard Dawkins (2006)₇

5. Most Holy Books’ Texts is Not About Morals: Most stories in holy books are about personalities – tales about what people are said to have done what. Most of them also involve war and cultural struggles between different peoples, and are often written from within one particular geographical area. It is possible to read these stories and take out of them a wide range of morals, and therefore, to think that these indirect lessons have divine mandate. The same occurs with alllong texts. Take Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – it is very much like the Bible (in style), and it is clear to see that you could spend your entire life analyzing it for morals. Many people who undertook such a task would come to different conclusions, just as with Holy Books. The simple fact remains that the parts of the text that say “Here follows a moral rule, to be obeyed by all people for all time” are very infrequent indeed. The Qur’an is much more frank than the Bible, but is still mostly about the retelling of events.

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6. Cultural Context: As time passes, the original cultural assumptions and cultural understanding of phrases and words will all change, making it impossible for many things to be understood by future audiences in the same way that the original authors meant them. The longer ago something was written, the less the context is clear to us today, and this opens the way for much culturally subjective opinion. “Love thy neighbour as thyself” has meant various things at various times: A land of barbarians may feel quite free to brutalize others just as they brutalize themselves₈, whereas band of 1970s hippies spread love in a much more physical way. Over time, morals are simply read into texts differently, hence why religious prohibitions change over time too. We read text literally, chronologically and philosophically, but both The Koran and much of The Bible was written in prose, in poetry, using many symbolic aspects and word games. Shifts in time and place mean that there are unknown cultural references that we cannot possibly understand now, even if text that we think we are reading correctly.As a society changes its moral views, its interpretation of Biblical texts changes with it. This much is common sense. The force of that change is often within society itself. The reading of morals from the Bible changes alongside society, but generally speaking lags by a generation or two. Examples are in diverse areas such as the abolition of slavery, birth control, women’s rights, gay equality, individualism (i.e. sola scripture, decentralized church), race equality and religious freedom₉.
   

   “The Churches have steadily become more like reflectors of the practice of the times, gradually and hesitatingly endorsing change. In the emphasis on ‘getting up to date’ the Churches tacitly recognize their own increasingly marginal capacity to influence society. The shifts of Church response on the issue of birth control illustrate the way in which moral theologians have attempted to come to terms with the changing moral practice of societies which they increasingly realize they know very little about. […] By 1958, theologians had begun to accept the lead of social scientists. They refer to ‘the quantity and complexity of sociological information’, and […] the Scriptures, revelation, papal and Episcopal pronouncements had ceased to be accepted, even by clerics, as adequately prepared guidance for society.”

   “Religion in Secular Society” by Bryan Wilson (1966)₁₀

7. Translations: All of the above problems come together when translations of holy texts are made. One thing that fundamentalists do get right is their determined and enviable attempts to read scripture in its original language (which is easier for Muslim Arabs who still speak the same language the Koran was written in). But we have very few of the original texts of our major religions. We rely on copies-of-copies-of-copies, which at some point, have often been translated – quotations changed from Aramaic to Greek, entire texts from Latin to English, based on Greek translations. We know that even from very early on numerous mistranslations have been introduced₁₁, such as the mistaken usage of the word “virgin” to describe the prophecy of Jesus’ birth since the major Septuagint translation.

It is surprising that anyone thinks a god would attempt to communicate with us in any particular language, let alone ancient ones. If I was god, I would transmit my message directly into everyone’s brain. That way problems with translation and subjectivism would be removed and people could make informed decisions and moral choices based on the full facts, rather than miscommunicated ideals. This would end all translation and transmission problems too.

Clearly, no gods have imparted such a universal moral message into the minds of mankind. If there is a supreme and omniscient creator god then it is responsible for creating the way that our brains work. Such a being knows that we can only interpret life subjectively, and that no text will mean the same thing for any two people. Therefore by design, any sacred text must only be designed by God for the specific culture into which the text arose.