If there is no order to the universe, and therefore some being, some force that ordered it, then who determines what is right or wrong? There is nothing immoral if there’s nothing in charge.Imagine a toddler who always behaves well when his mother is in the room, but as soon as she leaves starts to color on the walls and throw things at the cat. If you ask me, a person who is only moral because he thinks God is watching is just like that toddler. I don't have any trouble refraining from hurting people, regardless of whether God is keeping track. The reason to refrain from hurting other people is that it is mean and nasty; why does God have to be invoked here? Which is not to say that my humanist morality is the same as a religious one. I have trouble with the notion of victimless crimes, for example; to me wrong always involves harm to somebody. I find the notion of kosher rules bizarre, and ditto rules about how to treat the flag. But I don't see any reason to think that religious believers are, on average, more moral than non-believers, and when I look around the world I see millions of believers committing crimes I can't imagine participating in myself
Monday, October 18, 2010
Religion and Morality
I was just reading this essay by Frans de Waal, about morality and religion. Religious believers all seem to assume that there can be no morality without God; as Al Sharpton put it,
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I actually thought de Waal's essay was stronger in its challenge to the selfish-gene theorists than to religion. Religion is only partly, and perhaps even secondarily, a system of morals. It is also about one's relationship to divine or supernatural or some sort of "other" being or beings. The rules of kosher, for example, are clearly about the practitioner adopting a certain stance (obedient, respectful, pure, and separate from other humans) before the divine being. Of course, it is psychologically curious that people would a) imagine that divine beings exist and b) that such beings require obedience, respect, purity, and tribal distinctiveness. Nevertheless, on their own terms, I think rules like kosher do make sense.
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