Why religion is fading in the West

[LTX]

91. The point of my post was the remarkably pithy yet vacuous summary of Spinoza's philosophic writings.

Humanity, of course, decides what is moral and what is not. And does so by reference to historical writings and ruminations on ethics and morality. These ruminations are recored in, inter alia, scriptural writings and philosophic critiques of scriptural writings (see Spinoza, whose biblical critiques and scriptural analyses are rather well known).

The notion floated in the post I originally responded to was that the bible cannot be an ethical or moral reference point because it contains, to put in teenage terms, a bunch of bad stuff. Yet, oddly enough, the bible has been an historical reference point for ethical and moral discussion for a rather long time. I know it's hard to believe, but we aren't actually inventing ethical and moral analyses from whole cloth as a product of our contemporary, intellectual superiority.