Moving away

The cultural aspects of sacred books don't seem to figure much into the practice of the people using those books.  People seem to want to do the things specified in the books even if the culture of today doesn't use or even think about practices specified from ages and ages ago.  I had a discussion with a young man not long ago, who was not particularly knowledgeable of the Bible, comparing the laws of the Old Testament with another ancient law code (Hammurapi's) and with modern American laws.  He had no trouble at all commenting about how things had changed and how modern laws were so much better, more humane than the old laws of both the codes.

He thought, for example it was much more humane to have prisons than to kill or mutilate (like taking a hand off).  Expediency in dealing immediately with the crime wasn't a consideration for him over having another chance.  He thought it was much better to wait time than to have swiftness of punishment.  I noticed also that he didn't have any trouble with some of the laws being outdated or not in step with modern lifestyle.  For example, one law said that if a groom was disappointed with not getting a virgin for a wife, he should produce the sheets from the wedding night.  He mentioned that that law was of particular notice for being very out of touch with today's reality.

Finally, he spoke of the two law codes from the ancient world using the phrase tagged to the end the laws that they were in effect "for all time."  American law has a better system he thought because of the built-in mechanism to change laws with an amendment process.

If I have a main beef with modern religion, it is that it doesn't account for what has happened in the world since the sacred book was written.  God is unchanging they say.  Well, even if that is true of God, it isn't the case for humans.  When we moderns look up at the skies, for example, in our world, we know that the sky looks like it revolves around the Earth but it is because of the Earth's movement mainly, but also its movement in conjunction with other bodies.  We know distances between planets and stars.  We know exactly what the surface of at least two other celestial bodies look like because we've been there.  We know that our system is heliocentric, not geocentric.  We know what other galaxies' shapes are and our galaxy's place among other star systems is (one of trillions).  We entertain life existing on other planets rather than dieties coming to our own.

There's a disconnect in the world today with that of a view from a previous time.   And, not a small one as exemplified in the paragraph above.  Orientation is unequivocally different.  The change in laws systems is a great analog to point out the disparate viewpoints between two cultures separated in time.  That's really bothersome to me and the reason why religion seems to be, like the bodies in the universe, moving away from position it has held as the center of modern life.