For this post, I am going to diverge from my main points to hopefully answer a question posed by Chris. He says, "Can we hope to have any ethics or morality based in something other than various religious teachings? Even though I'm an atheist, my sense of what is right and wrong were confirmed by a somewhat Christian childhood..." For this, I am going to rely on the writings of Christopher Hitchens. This particular selection comes from his book, god is not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything (published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd in 2007).
"The argument that religious belief improves people, or that it helps to civilize society, is one that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case. Very well, they seem to say, we cease to insist on the Exodus (say), or the Virgin Birth or even the Resurrection, or the 'night flight' from Mecca to Jerusalem. But where would people be without faith? Would they not abandon themselves to every kind of license and selfishness? Is it not true, as G.K. Chesterton once famously said, that if people cease to believe in god, they do not believe in nothing but in everything?
The first thing to be said is that virtuous behavior by a believer is no proof at all of - indeed is not even an argument for - the truth of his belief. I might, just for the sake of argument, act more charitably if I believed that Lord Buddha was born from a slit in his mother's side. But would not this make my charitable impulse dependent upon something rather tenuous? By the same token, I do not say that if I catch a Buddhist priest stealing all the offerings left by the simple folk at his temple, Buddhism is thereby discredited. And we forget in any case how contingent all this is. Of the thousands of possible desert religions there were, as with the millions of potential species there were, one branch happened to take root and grow. Passing through its Jewish mutations to its Christian form, it was eventually adopted by the Emperor Constantine, and made into an official faith with - eventually - a codified and enforceable form of its many chaotic and contradictory books. As for Islam, it became the ideology of a highly successful conquest that was adopted by successful ruling dynasties, codified and set down in turn, and promulgated as the law of the land. One or two military victories the other way - as with Lincoln at Antietam - and we in the West would not be the hostages of village disputes that took place in Judaea and Arabia before any serious records were kept. We could have become the votaries of another belief altogether - perhaps a Hindu or an Aztec or a Confucian one - in which case we should still be told that, strictly true or not, it nonetheless helped teach the children the difference between right and wrong. In other words, to believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing." (pp. 184-185)
He continues...
"An even more graphic example is afforded by the case of Rwanda, which in 1992 gave the world a new synonym for genocide and sadism. This former Belgian possession is the most Christian country in Africa, boasting the highest percentage of churches per head of population, with 65 percent of Rwandans professing Roman Catholicism and another 15 percent adhering to various Protestant sects. The words 'per head' took on a macabre ring in 1992, when at a given signal the racist militias of 'Hutu Power,' incited by state and church, fell upon their Tutsi neighbors and slaughtered them en masse." (190)
Here he does not mean to state that because the Church was in Rwanda, that the Church is necessarily evil, rather that a religious presence does not mean there is a purely ethical and moral community. Just as he says one corrupt Buddhist priest does not discredit the entire religion, this does not discredit Christianity as a whole. It does however discredit the notion that religion, and only religion, means ethics and kindness.
8 comments:
I think a more pressing issue is whether or not our morals that are founded in religion have any credence. I would agree that religion is not necessary for morals to exist, and in fact many of our modern morals are not be derived from religion, perhaps even contradicting religion, but does this mean that our morals derived from religion are valueless?
North American values are obviously strongly rooted in Christianity and I believe that some of these Christian values are still important to our society despite whether or not a god exists. The Bible speaks out against a number of "illicit" sexual acts and although some of them seem quite dated, I still personally believe some of them to still be immoral. Illicit sexual acts such as pedophilia and bestiality are generally considered immoral in todays North American society, but have been part of rites of passage in other societies. What is it that makes these acts innately immoral? Mostly it has to do with the structure of our society developing from christianity which defines them as immoral. (please do not respond saying that I am trying to justify pedophilia or bestiality)
Beyond the common sexual taboos, religion sets moral standards for property rights and personal rights. It can be difficult to define absolute morals for a society to abide by without a divine being having created them. Religion has provided the basis for the formation of this society and if it were to be decided that religion is a hoax do we just throw its contributions out? And if don't rid of them, then how do we justify its continued imposition on society.
If we do not derive our morals from ancient texts then we are leaving morals to be decided by the next most powerful group in our society. Individuals are then held in sway with the whims of what benefits the dominant group of society. This group very rarely represents the majority of society and this can lead to obvious problems.
The benefit of deriving our morals and as such our laws from ancient texts is that we are more or less all playing by the same unalterable set of rules. It is important to remember that morals extend beyond our personal lives and into institutions. As such, changes in morals can have drastic outcomes on our societal structures most often through our judicial system.
When we deny the credibility of religion how do we maintain the credibility of the morals that support the functioning of this society?
You raise some very good points and merit a longer response than this but I am hoping someone else will also respond. I just feel it important to note, that to my knowledge and memory, nowhere in the Christian Bible is pedophilia condemned. I am pretty sure that one came out of basic human morality although it would be interesting to see where that was first made illegal. Please correct me if I am wrong (specific passages would be appreciated from anyone who knows the answer), although I know you are correct in stating that bestiality is condemned in the Bible.
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea (Matthew 18:10, King James Version)
Is the passage that I've seen interpreted as against pedophilia
hm..that's true, I didn't think of that passage at all obviously. Also problematic too though that it is only for children who believe in god, but I could see how that could evolve into an all-encompassing law.
aren't all children born with an innate intuition of god and we have to coerce them out of it? ;)
I think a lot of the morals and ethics that we talk about using the vocabularies of various religions (thou shalt not kill, etc etc) are actually injunctions against actions which fundamentally disrupt and dissolve functioning social orders. I would flip the question -- if religion is a social artifact (and it is a social artifact -- it cannot exist prior to language and discourse, and therefore must only exist within the context of a social relationship) then what does that imply for religious imperatives?
I would argue (drawing from a functionalist account, but I'd widen it FAR beyond what any functionalist would be in favour of) that certain actions are inimical to the functioning of any society -- taking that which you are not entitled to, rampant dishonesty, murder, immediate family incest, etc etc. These are the things that are subject to sanction in most religions & cultures. But as a social artifact, religion also encompasses the biases and socio-historical trends of the time period. Because of this, religion can allow or even incentivize certain types of dysfunctional behaviour (the stoning to death of gay folks comes to mind), because it provides a framework in which those things are able to function, temporarily. The problem is that most oppressions--whether stemming from religious narratives or otherwise--are experienced as dysfunctional by those who suffer them. So they can be contested, and if the concerns can't be absorbed, problems emerge. Religious narratives are the same as other narratives--they exclude certain groups and are therefore experienced as oppressive by those groups. Where there's oppression, you've got potential for a non-functioning society. The incentive to absorb contestation from groups who experience society as dysfunctional is the possibility of total social dissolution.
Generally, though, I wouldn't frame it in those terms. Habermas, Philip Pettit, Isaiah Berlin, Richard Rorty -- all of them talk about the different ways we can be moral(/ethical/civil/virtuous) in secular societies. Rorty makes a compelling argument about why we shouldn't be cruel to one another. So does Iris Marion Young. There are plenty of self-consistent theories of secular society that don't abandon the vocabularies of morality or rightness, they just couch them in different narratives or terms.
I don't know if that makes sense, it's just that...people who argue that religion is prior to basic "morality" are wrong. Religious narratives necessitate the prior existence of society, not the other way around.
So is this to suggest that with the dismissal of religion as a valid belief, we maintain social morality as defined by religion until a natural progression of conflict forces absorption of contesting moralities? If this is so it seems illogical to define religion as incorrect or intolerable, but to retain its morality until people fight to have it changed. If this is not the case and we are to throw out the morality of religion which is a large foundation of our society it seems difficult to maintain social order during the transitioning period.
I have difficulty with the idea that religion is inherently intolerable. It's like any other social institution: it serves a multiplicity of purposes and these purposes are different in different social locations.
The idea that eliminating the oppressive aspects of religious practice necessarily means "throwing out" the morality of religion is not quite what I am trying to get at. I would argue that the 'morality of religion' is simply injunctions against those things which are deeply harmful to the functioning of society, phrased in the vocabulary of religious belief. All that is necessary is that these injunctions be translated into secular vocabularies, so they can be spoken about as moral goods without reference to a higher being. Those actions which lead to the dissolution of society will almost universally face sanction, whether the society doing the sanctioning embraces religious narratives or not. Religion is just a framework, and it is not the framework from which these sanctions emerged. They are prior to it.
Those aspects of religion which are experienced as dysfunctional or oppressive by members of society who contest them can be thrown out, as far as I'm concerned. As our conception of "we" expands to include more and more of humanity, their claims to experiencing oppression have to be addressed, and can be addressed in many frameworks of moral or ethical behaviour that are not couched in the vocabulary of religious belief.
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