jdright raises some good points. Which is kind of the point, no-one has come up with a good &quot;right&quot; way to live or act and it is often even harder without a theist grounding to decide on some pretty major points. You can clearly construct ethical philosophies but it is very hard to compare them to others and say whether one is better than another. Especially once you start getting into &quot;brains in vats&quot; territory.<p>Plus going back to burning witches and stoning homosexuals, really? Firstly there&#x27;s some really interesting language translation behind &quot;suffer not the witch to live&quot; - in that isn&#x27;t what it really says. Burning people has to be seen in the context of history and politics.<p>It isn&#x27;t about &quot;cherry picking&quot;. Different traditions have their basis, I&#x27;m not sola scriptorum, the CofE believes in &quot;scripture, reason and tradition&quot;. But in all cases it is about looking at scripture as a complex document full of metaphor, stories and allegories. Then making an argument based on that which can be debated, discussed and a conclusion arrived at - and one that can later be decided as perhaps wrong.
What you also need to bear in mind is that significant parts of what Jesus is recorded as saying is pointing out areas of religion where the Jews had become caught up in process or tradition rather than the underlying message.