Can you be more moral without religion?

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: raildogg
Sure you can, Abraham Lincoln was a self confessed atheist and his deep faith in what is right kept this country together. Religion is not always right and it's certainly not always moral.

Mark Twain, a great man who I admire was a atheist. He said many things that would be perceived as anti-Christian today.

Thomas Paine who was a strong abolitionist and fought against slavery was a atheist. Yet he had a very strong moral base.

So again, religion and morality do not always go together. You can be just as compassionate as someone who is religious. I believe how a person is brought up is the key to how they will function as an adult.

One can study the bible night and day and still turn out to be a mass murderer. Thats why I would much rather have two gays raise a child than a violent or deranged single parent.

Well said!

I personally think moral behavior is more about being concerned with things other than just yourself, religion can be one way to provide that world view, but there are certainly many other ways.

 

[gordanfreeman]

Originally posted by: syzygy

without religion, you would need to reinvent the wheel. religion contains the questions you have never thought of asking and answers that you could never have reached on your own. its a matter of wisdom borne from the failures and lessons of others over hundreds of years.

on another level, religion also codifies a certain way of behaving that reduces the haggling that can produce so many competing individual perspectives. having a dominant viewpoint can be very important when you are trying to glue together alot of different people, especially when you need a large number of people to live in relative harmony.

i would completely disagree. im no expert on polytheistic religions but they were around long before monotheisms and i dont know many of them (if any) that had strict moral codes like christianity, judaism, islam, etc have. despite this i know the people in these civilizations did not go around like roaving hoardes of barbarians. these people lived moral lives without the teachings of those before them (the bible for example) or underlying principles as part of their religion. they lived to please the gods, but the gods were not prescriptive, they were just a way to explain what the people could not.

living by some sort of moral code (other than one provided by a religion) provides for a way to interact with others in a moral manner. in practice this would be hard to find due to the prevelance of religion in the world today, but i see no reason why it would not work.

 

[syzygy]

Originally posted by: gordanfreeman

Originally posted by: syzygy

without religion, you would need to reinvent the wheel. religion contains the questions you have never thought of asking and answers that you could never have reached on your own. its a matter of wisdom borne from the failures and lessons of others over hundreds of years.

on another level, religion also codifies a certain way of behaving that reduces the haggling that can produce so many competing individual perspectives. having a dominant viewpoint can be very important when you are trying to glue together alot of different people, especially when you need a large number of people to live in relative harmony.

i would completely disagree. im no expert on polytheistic religions but they were around long before monotheisms and i dont know many of them (if any) that had strict moral codes like christianity, judaism, islam, etc have. despite this i know the people in these civilizations did not go around like roaving hoardes of barbarians. these people lived moral lives without the teachings of those before them (the bible for example) or underlying principles as part of their religion. they lived to please the gods, but the gods were not prescriptive, they were just a way to explain what the people could not.

living by some sort of moral code (other than one provided by a religion) provides for a way to interact with others in a moral manner. in practice this would be hard to find due to the prevelance of religion in the world today, but i see no reason why it would not work.

polytheisms were, if anything, worse than monotheisms. ancient egypt was the most conservative society in the history of the world. their moral codes were so stutlifying and unchanging that their society experienced little if any change for eons. if you ever visit a large enough museum that contains a decent collection of ancient egyptian art (or artifacts), your own eyes will marvel at how static their customs and style remained for thousands of years.

ancient greece was militaristic and imperialistic, yet they too were polytheistic. mongols were polytheists, and they too were heirarchical and quite militaristic. they were all preserved and given raison detre by their code of beliefs.

the yanomani inidans, neolithic hold-overs, are polytheistic, mysoginistic, and war-mongering. they kill to appease their gods. they beat one another up as a way of acting out preservation myths. yet they persist, although i wouldn't say flourish.

on your specific point about major polytheisms (their 'gods') not being 'prescriptive', ancient greece and ancient egypt both contained central oracular components to their faiths. high priests and cult worshippers were often consulted by rulers about what course of action to take. the delphi oracle, as an example, was consulted on countless occasions by both sides in the peloponnesian war.

 

[Zebo]

Define moral?

Next about Harveys "bad vibes" scenario. I bet the pharohs got real good vides having 100,000's of slaves, a couple hundred concubines, and infinite wealth and privilidge.

Even though I grew up RC and still go I really believe like Friedrich Nietzsche says:
"There are no moral phenomena; only moral interpretations of phenomena."


And in general all modern religions were started by the proletariat as a form of wealth and power redistribution. The reality is People either desire or do not desire things and then either obtain them or do not do so. . Also People either desire or do not desire to do things... As for whether or not they deserve these things, whether it's "right" or "wrong", I honestly don't even know what the hell that means. This concept appears often in the context of traditional moral doctrine, but whenever I try to think about it in a serious, analytical way, it becomes devoid of any meaning.

 

[Zebo]

Heres the deal Tabb. A conflict exists in all human beings.

1. The instinct to live by rules, act peacefully, and value the good of the group. This is often described as Morals and/or laws. You don't need religion to have this concept enacted, but it helps in it's justification/edification. Many use terms like "natural law" or "golden rule" as thier justification if not religion.

2. Next is the instinct to gratify one?s immediate desires, act violently to obtain supremacy over others, and enforce one?s will. Generally this instinct is far more primal and fundamental to the human psyche than the instinct in #1.

This is why we are so screwed up IMO. Always fighting internally between these competing diametrically oppesed impluses. It also does'nt help many people favor 1 over 2 or vise versa.

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: Zebo
like Friedrich Nietzsche says:
"There are no moral phenomena; only moral interpretations of phenomena."

What it comes down to is that it's totally irrelevant if what is "actually moral" is defined by God, since all we humans have are our perceptions, processed through our highly fallible minds. Even if we think we're reading about "God's morality" in the Bible, what we understand from the Bible is based on a combination of how what was originally written in the Bible got there, what has evolved in the Bible after generations of translation and re-translation, and (finally) our ability to comprehend what's written there today. Any part of this process could easily cause errors (and almost certainly has caused them). So even if the Bible originally contained the true words of God, in practice, morality comes from the minds of humans. There's no way of avoiding this.