This essay topic should be easy. All I would need to do is agree or disagree with the moral teachings of the religious texts we had gone over in class. However, after rereading and compiling a list of the stories I would wish to analyze, I was again hit by the question that would never go away: "What is morality?"
Damnit! I thought I was done with the whole issue back when we finished reading Freud. Obviously, morality is in the eye of the observer. However, the eye of the observer is usually directly linked to faith. To a devout Christian, the Bible should be a rulebook of morals. If the Bible tells you that adultery is immoral, then adultery is immoral. End of question. So if I were a devout Christian who only knew to obey and not to think for myself, this essay would consist of how all the Bible stories are moral.
Luckily, I am not such a person, and interpret the Bible as merely a book of stories. The first time I ever read the Bible was for this class, and I found it very interesting. These stories didn't seem to make very much sense to me. Take the story of Abraham and Isaac for example. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his first born son for some reason, and so Abraham shrugs and takes his son out for a "journey," and right as he's about to kill him, an angel comes down and says, "No no no, God was kidding" or something along those lines, and they sacrifice a goat instead, and God makes the nation of Israel for Abraham. End scene. The only moral I can pull from this story is to obey. Obey God, no matter how messed up his requests may be, because he may be testing you. What kind of a moral is that? This hinders any Christian's ability to question anything.
Why did Abraham have to lie to his son? In the Bible nobody ques ...