Morality Vs. Religion

[NyxPeregrine]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this, move if desired! Anyways...I'm currently writing a 15-page paper I'm titling "Morality ≠ Religion: A Rational Basis for Human Values" for one of my sociology classes. This is what my outline looks like.

 

Overview of essay: There is a foundation for ethical behavior, separate from religious creed, that can be developed by a reasonable examination of human conduct and behavioral consequences.

 

(1) We can understand right and wrong logically because moral concerns translate into facts about how our actions affect the experience of other conscious creatures.

(2) It is in an individual’s best interests to act morally: it works towards survival.

(3) A society in which people help each other will flourish (and therefore benefit the individual) more than a society with no such cooperative efforts. Interdependence requires law and order to govern human interaction.

(4) Comparison of secular behavior to various religious behaviors—religions are not always a satisfactory developing ground of moral behavior, but they do serve to standardize and justify a people group’s moral code.

 

Relevance of Topic to Society: This study is to examine how a reasonable approach to living in society obligates members of that society to act morally.

 

Since Christians love to pull the "without-religion-everyone-would-run-around-killing-each-other" card, I was wondering how you all respond to this issue...I'll definitely be drawing from Locke's social contracts theory and cite the Golden Rule throughout history (Confucius thought of it first!), but...anything I should add? What's your viewpoint on the relationship between religion and morality?

[Ouroboros]

I like it. Good layout.

 

My personal response, first at least, is that most animals don't just run around and kill other animals of the same species, or even of other species, without reason. They do it out of need, necessity, hunger, defense, territory (essentially fighting for food resources), and so on. But you never see wolves kill each other until only one is standing in each pack. So there is an inherent mechanism that has evolved to protect a group of individuals. Unnecessary slaying is ultimately selected against since it kills the ability to reproduce. And since we've evolved from animals, we do have a fundamental sense of "not-killing". It doesn't always work and there are other reasons to why humans hunt (for fun, thrill, etc), but in general, for instance, I don't have a drive within me to just go out and kill everything I see. And it's not based on a command in a book or a magical voice speaking in my ear. It's simply the fact that the mere thought is reprehensible (emotionally). So if the "no-kill" moral is given by God, then God gave it to many animals and us, as an emotion or drive, not as a code. And it's a drive that can be overridden by other needs and drives too. So it's not absolute either. Does it make any sense at all?

[agnosticator]

What's your viewpoint on the relationship between religion and morality?

 

Hi NyxPeregrine! I also like your ideas, and I like your interests under your avatar! They are almost identical to mine, except that I play another instrument. I suck on violin!

 

Confucious' "Silver" Rule of reciprocity is stated in the negative, which is more realistic than the modern "Golden" version. I think it is the best version.

As to the relationship between religion and morality, maybe you could use my favorite quote from Ludwig Feuerbach's ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY:http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/ec27.htm (not that I'm a Marxist! They just have the whole book there for free...and I love free books)

 

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. I can found morality on theology only when I myself have already defined the Divine Being by means of morality. In the contrary case, I have no criterion of the moral and immoral, but merely an unmoral, arbitrary basis, from which I may deduce anything I please. Thus, if I would found morality on God, I must first of all place it in God: for Morality, Right, in short, all substantial relations, have their only basis in themselves, can only have a real foundation – such as truth demands – when they are thus based. To place anything in God, or to derive anything from God, is nothing more than to withdraw it from the test of reason, to institute it as indubitable, unassailable, sacred, without rendering an account why. Hence self-delusion, if not wicked, insidious design is at the root of all efforts to establish morality, right, on theology. Where we are in earnest about the right we need no incitement or support from above. We need no Christian rule of political right: we need only one which is rational, just, human. The right, the true, the good, has always its ground of sacredness in itself, in its quality, where man is in earnest about ethics, they have in themselves the validity of a divine power. If morality has no foundation in itself, there is no inherent necessity for morality; morality is then surrendered to the groundless arbitrariness of religion.

 

I think this sums up the true relationship between religion and morality. I hope it helps.

[Positivist]

I'm useless at this stuff but just finished reading this 10 minutes ago, written by a philosophy prof!

 

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/

 

Happy writing! :-)

[jackbauer]

The biggest problem with religious morality (or more specifically, conservative traditional morality) are that many of the things they condemn are victimless crimes. Who is harmed by two people of the same gender getting married? No one, but the religious right condemns it. Who are harmed by birth control? No one, in fact, not using it could actually be more harmful. But of course, the religious politicians like Rick Santorum speak out against this. Some ironically consider using birth control "irresponsible" which to me sounds like "the slut needs to be punished with children!".

 

Now if we go by the ten commandments.

 

4 of them are about pleasing God.

5 (honor your mother and father) does not take into account abusive parents.

Killing, lying, and stealing, are generally bad, but the way it's worded doesn't leave room for grey area (what about self defense? what about white lies? what if your trying to feed your starving family?).

Adultery is a jerk thing to do, but only if you're in a relationship and lying about it. Even then, what if the relationship is abusive and they feel threatened if they leave?

And the last one about coveting is just a human emotion.

 

Then there's how you interprate it. Ray Comfort actually thinks the first commandment means you must love God more than anything else. No, that's not an option, God is commanding you to love him! (despite the whole free will thing). I can't think of anything more screwed up than that. Then there's thought crimes which are even more ridiculous. Natural sexual urges and human emotions are considered evil even though they do not harm anyone.

 

I'm not even going to get into the morality of having Jesus killed to satisfy God's sense of justice and the horrific doctrine of eternal torment. The punishments are a lot more harmful than any of the crimes. If anything is immoral, it's all the fear and guilt religion throws at you. You're killing yourself to live up to an impossible standard, repressing natural urges and feeling completely worthless. Unlike most of the ten commandments, that can actually be harmful.

[NyxPeregrine]

I think I'm going to have trouble keeping the "why-religion-is-not-moral" section short enough! I could pretty much quote the entire Old Testament...

[Guest wester]

I spent last year teaching a group of 4 year olds how to read. Trust me - by age 4 without a day of church or a whit of religion they have a highly developed sense of morality. I often saw them acting like a bunch of little lawyers pleading their cases to me and to each other. Brilliant actually. Cheers.

[BMandeville]

Religious, superstitious, or theistic belief is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for moral behavior. As you rightly point out, social animals have an objective interest in behaving in a manner conducive to efficient group function, which for humans effectively means morality. Morality can be reduced to the balance between self-interest and collective cooperation, in that an individual may modify his or her behavior in order to maintain membership in a group for survival reasons, even if those modifications reflect desires other than the individual's impulse at the time, be they those of long-term survival or collective interest.

 

With regard to theism as a prerequisite for moral behavior, nothing could be further from the truth. True, religion has played a role in defining rules of decorum for a society, but that has never guaranteed the ethicity of those rules, and given the fact that some of the great moral thinkers such as Aristotle and Confucious came from a decidedly non-religious standpoint, it is reasonable to think that such simple rules as "Thou shalt not kill" would have arisen regardless of the presence of religion. In any case, people were deciding to not kill members of their own group/family/society long before any commandments were written.

 

The fact that members of different, or even the same religions cannot agree on exactly what constitutes moral behavior should be our first clue that religiosity does not amount to moral infallibility, or as a former religious teacher of mine put it, "piety does not amount to holiness." The second is that no one is born with a belief in a god, and specific notions or beliefs are not inherent to the psyche and must be taught; sure we may have biological predispositions towards superstitious belief and abstract thinking, but no one is a born believer, which is presumably why all believers are thus "born again." Since the concept of god must be introduced to the human mind (or at least, specific characteristics and rationalizations of such), all believers must take an initial first step of deciding whether or not this idea is worth accepting, and they must decide that apart from and outside the concept of god. In other words, they cannot decide on the acceptability of the belief within the context of it, which proves that all humans have at least the moral intuition to examine the concept of god (even if they are only children) prior to accepting it, showcasing the ability to make a decision with large moral implications without the aid of a god. It would naturally follow that we are therefore capable of other moral decisions without religious doctrine or theistic beliefs.

[Kurari]

I concur with pretty much everyone, but I'd like to add that one of my pet peeves about this particular question is that people pretty much always cut out how people feel. Like we only behave ourselves for some cold, psycopathic practicality and no other reason. I think one truth is, humans act a lot on emotion. We don't try to hurt others because we CARE about them. We feel love, compassion, and empathy for one another. We don't like watching other beings suffer, and I think that there is a core point of morality...our SENSE of right and wrong. It's something we can feel.

 

Yes, I know, there are a lot of people out there who have had this stunted within them or are born without a working gauge and are diagnosed with psycopathy. But I think for the average person, it's pretty much a visceral reaction when confronted with the idea of hurting someone not to do it.

 

Being a loving, caring, generous, moral person is a big part of how you gain happiness, peace, and a good life. I don't know if you can put this in your paper, but I thought I'd throw that down anyway.

[BMandeville]

We feel love, compassion, and empathy for one another. We don't like watching other beings suffer, and I think that there is a core point of morality...our SENSE of right and wrong. It's something we can feel.

 

Well said. I don't believe that anyone discounts emotion in questions such as these; I think it's merely a question of labels and semantics. What we may know colloquially as "compassion" is better described, as you yourself put it, as "We don't like watching other beings suffer." Sarah Brosnan did a study in 2005 which suggested that chimpanzees do not tolerate perceived inequity or unfairness towards other individuals. Though this was slightly repudiated by Brauer et al in a subsequent study which indicated that chimps are more likely reacting to perceived unfairness towards themselves, if we keep in mind Fehr and Schmidt's 1999 study on humans which found the same conclusion as Brosnan et al, we can reasonably posit that there is a biological basis for emotions such as compassion which foster group cohesion and efficiency. No one would dispute the fact that love is a necessary biological phenomenon that helps ensure the survival of our species in the form of pair bonding, child rearing, and genetic propogation; it would naturally follow that compassion is similar, albeit for reasons that are social in nature yet no less necessary for individual as well as collective survival. This does not negate the importance of these emotions by any means, and I would like to point out that their utility is undiminished by the realization of their origin or evolutionary purpose. Tomato, to-mah-to.

[LivingLife]

Some really good posts and material, gonna be hard to put all that in 15 pages.

 

What I can offer is that it took the army 6 weeks to convert me from a pacifist coward to an emotionless trained killer ready do die for the cause of my country. I was 18 and conscripted to national service. Luckily I got a HQ posting due to a recent motorcycle accident and being declared unfit to serve in the front lines.

 

The pacifist coward was suppressed and regardless of political motivations which you can compare to religious indoctrination, my outlook was changed but thankfully not forever. The fervour wore off and the letter I wrote to my parents expressing these views I thought WTF was wrong with me. I wonder if I would have been able to pull the trigger if necessary?

 

Now at 54 I realise the futility of war, it achieves nothing and people die for a cause they really did not need at that age. Most combatants that lost lives and limbs were under 20 years of age.

 

Hence morality can be shaped to the good of the group and in the case of military service, it was serve or go to jail for the same amount of time. How can an 18 yo grasp the reality of freedom coming out of school to go to prison as a moral objector?

 

In the end my father volunteered as a reserve cop serving as a guard on strategic assets and at one time all the men in my family were in uniform at the same time.

 

If that helps use it. I can elaborate.

[Exevolt]

I never found that you had to be religious to be moral throughout my life. Most of the most moral and kinder people I met turned out to be non-religious. A point was made by jackbaur about the 10 commandments and the no room for a gray area that I agree with. Religious morality is also a dual edged sword as it cast those who aren't necessarily immoral as immoral and evil or they preach religious morality yet do not practice it. To me religious morality=hypocrisy.