You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Morality’ tag.
It is nice when you can find some who speaks so clearly on a topic. I recommend you read the entire article by Greta Christina, but these are her concluding words. Her post is a response to William Lane Craig an educated religious apologist who in his writing and debates defends the christian religion against rationality and reality.
“It’s funny. One of the most common pieces of bigotry aimed at atheism is that it doesn’t provide any basis for morality. It’s widely assumed that without religion — without moral teachings from religious traditions, and without fear of eternal punishment and desire for eternal reward — people would behave entirely selfishly, with no concern for others. And atheists are commonly accused of moral relativism: of thinking that there are no fundamental moral principles, and that all morality can be adapted to suit the needs of the moment.
But it isn’t atheists who are saying, “Well, sure, genocide seems wrong… but under some circumstances, it actually makes a certain amount of sense.” It isn’t atheists who are saying, “Well, sure, infanticide seems wrong… but looked at in a certain light, it really isn’t all that bad.” It isn’t atheists who are prioritizing an attachment to an ancient ideology over the clearest moral principles one can imagine: the principle that entire races ought not to be systematically exterminated, and the principle that children ought not to be slaughtered.
Human beings have intrinsic compassion. We have a sense of justice. We have feelings of revulsion and rage when we see others harmed. We have a desire to help create a livable world. We have a willingness to make personal sacrifices — sometimes great sacrifices — to help others in need. And contrary to what Craig and many other Christians think, these moral emotions don’t derive from the Bible, and don’t require belief in God. They’re taught by virtually every religion and every society, and atheists feel them every bit as much as believers. Humans are a social species, and these emotions and principles evolved because they help members of a social species survive and reproduce. (Other social species seem to have some or all of these moral emotions as well.)
But our compassion and justice, our altruism and moral revulsion, can be twisted. They can be stunted. They can be denied, ignored, shoved to the back burner, rationalized away. They can be contorted to the point where we’re saying that black is white, war is peace, and the most blatant evil is actually goodness if you squint your eyes just right. They can be contorted to the point where we’re saying that genocide is okay because everyone gets what they deserve in the afterlife, and that infanticide is morally necessary to teach a lesson about the evils of murdering children.
And religion is Exhibit A in how this can happen.”
Justice and morality are human concepts. Trying to understand them through 2000 year old bronze age goggles does little to enhance one’s understanding as 43ally from youtube illustrates.
It amazes me how sometimes, when I criticize something in religion, the defence that theists supply are just as bad or worse than my original criticism. For instance, I have often said that the sermon on the mount promotes the idea of thought crime. Thinking hateful things is the same as murder and thinking sexy things is the same as adultery. If anything could show Christian dogma to be one of totalitarian fascism rather than of love, its the idea that you can be guilty just by thinking something.
When I point this out, I often get told that the message that I OUGHT to be getting from that passage is that, in the eyes of god, a sin is a sin. Sins are all equal under god’s divine judgment.
The first time I heard this, I did a double take. Even someone who’s had their intelligence ebbed by the retarding forces of religion should be able to see the horrible consequences of that little gem. Alas, once again, my optimism and charity were quickly deflated. That person was serious. So were the great number of believers who have told me the same thing since.
So, for them, and any who happen to think along the same lines, I would like to explain why it is so horrible. By saying a sin is a sin is a sin, and they are all morally equivalent in the eyes of god, the theist is equating the suffering a shop owner feels when someone steals a piece of gum from his store to the suffering felt by a rape victim. Indeed, if two people each steal a piece of gum, the shop owner has suffered from twice as many sins against him than the rape victim, so the shopkeeper has, by Christian math, been wronged more.
While I could go on at length why this is horrendous in the worst kind of way, I think if you can’t figure it for yourself, you are beyond any help that my postings can ever hope to give. But, to my amazement, the believers aren’t stumped by this. They say ‘oh, of course, to us humans one is much worse than the other, but I’m talking about in GOD’S eyes, not ours’.
They don’t seem to realize that their answer still doesn’t make anything better. They say that their god is perfectly good and just. If that is so, any difference between humans perception and that of their god would mean a deficiency on our part. That means, according to this abhorrent little bit Christian philosophy, rape victims are WRONG when they feel worse than the robbed shopkeeper. And our justice system is WRONG to treat the rapist more severely than it treats the gum thief. For if they were a bit more like Jesus, they would see that a sin is a sin and the right thing to do is to treat them equally.
If it’s morally reprehensible that a human take a certain view (like candy burglary is as bad as rape) then it would be just as revolting if a sky faerie took that view. So, not only does this sermon on the mount establish the ground rules for thought crime, it also, thanks to the defence posited by Christians, shows their god to be a despicable and morally bankrupt entity that belittles the suffering those who have endured the worst of crimes.
Three students were caught cheating on their Math 30 finals. Unsurprising, but I’m interested to see how this story develops. Three seems like a very small number compared to the amount of effort it takes to get a hold of a provincial final exam and then smuggle the answers into the examination room so one can reap the sour rewards of skulduggery.
They will be getting a small penalty, but nothing that will be particularly problematic for their overall academic careers. I’m making the assumption they have plans for further academia as that level of math exam is suitable for gaining entrance to post-secondary education.
“Why cheat” is the real question though. University level math is not going to get any easier, so why do yourself the disservice of prolonging your fated crash and burn in the cheating topic of your choice(only now its you who pay directly for the course)?
Pressure to achieve, increased competition, laziness all probably factored into the calculus these kids worked out regarding their decision to cheat. What would be interesting would be if we could interview these students to determine their reasons for cheating because I believe that our educational system has failed them, to a certain extent, because they got their wrongheaded ideas from somewhere. When do you toss away the moral path and descend into less auspicious choices?
I’ll keep an eye on the story.
I am continually astounded by Christian claims to moral supremacy, that they somehow have access to a pinnacle of ethics that non-believers just don’t share.
When I point out that non-believers do a great deal of good in the world, I find myself mostly ignored by theists. Apparently atheist acts of love and charity don’t count. So I tried another angle. If the good-deed doing Christians were to suddenly give up their faith, would they cease their acts of good will? Not a chance. If they actually cared about their fellow humans (which, in most cases, I believe they do) then the belief in some external sky faerie would have no bearing on their desire to help out their brothers and sisters. Again, my point is most frequently met with avoidance. And so, as I cannot get anywhere by promoting the morality of the faithless, I will now try lighting the candle of enlightenment from the other end. In this post I intend to debunk the validity of Christianity’s cornerstone of ‘ethics’: the ten commandments.
When defending the morality of their faith, Christians claim that all a society needs is wholesome and is found in the commandments. Further (as discussed above) the Bible is the only place to find these teachings. The most often cited are commandments five through nine, so I will start with those. Honour your parents, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, and don’t lie. Christians will go on and on about how good these rules are and to how bad things get when they are not obeyed. Surely, they must be divinely ordained and we ought to worship the supernatural being that delivered these rules to us. You catch that? Attribute an obvious truth to your deity and suddenly its THE god. That just doesn’t work.
Let me explain.
Don’t murder and don’t steal are not revelations in morality. Indeed, these have been laws for every human society for as long as there have been laws (and in case you’re not sure, the existence of laws does in fact predate Christianity). Further, these same laws have been observed in societies within the animal kingdom. Same with honouring parents. It’s an evolutionary strength found in a multitude of species. The young simply have a better chance at survival if they are close to their parents. What about that adultery one? Animals don’t get married, so that commandment is homo-sapien specific. Right? Oh wait. Marriage is just an extension of the ‘mate for life’ behaviour which IS displayed by a number of animal species (most at higher rates than us) including pigeons and termites. That’s right. Commandment number seven has been mastered by termites. Not really your typical image of absolute moral authority, is it? Not lying is a similar case. No society has every promoted duplicity between its members. These rules just aren’t that difficult for people to come up with on their own, and they certainly do not require some god to teach them.
So far the commandments are irrelevant to societal morality, as any society is perfectly capable of deriving these rules themselves. I will call this irrelevance “best case scenario”. To see how the commandments can fall short of this, we must look to the ones not yet mentioned. The first three are basically the same while the fourth is an extension of those three.
Not really a big surprise is it? I mean, slavery as a topic to most Westerners seems sort of a hazy far away topic. The indolent luxury of our society washes away much of our collective memory of slavery, ah yes feel the consumerist tide set you free.
Mostly, when one mentions the Slavery our memories draw back to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade of the the 16th century onwards. It was a horrible time, to say the least. The wild notion that all people are people still has not taken hold in our world even now in the 21st century.
Some of the not so nice facts from DW-World.de.
“Siddarth Kara, in his book “Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery,” says that there were just over 28 million slaves worldwide in 2006 divided into three categories: bonded labor/debt bondage, forced labor and trafficking slaves.
According to Kara, the profits generated worldwide by all forms of slavery in 2007 were just over $91 billion. That is second only to drug trafficking in terms of global criminal activities.
Information on slavery is very inexact. But we believe that the majority of slave victims – in the neighbourhood of 80 percent – are the female gender, and that around 50 percent are children. We believe that the largest category of slavery is sex slavery. This is not to minimize other large categories – domestic servitude slavery, forced labour in farms and factory slavery, child soldier slavery,” said John Miller, director of the US State Department‘s Office for Monitoring and Combating Trafficking in Persons.
Human trafficking is synonymous with slavery. Human trafficking relies on coercion and exploitation. It thrives on converting hope to fear. It’s maintained through violence. The trade in people is a major source of revenue – in the billions [of dollars per year] – for organized crime, along with the drug trade and the arms trade. Let there be no misunderstanding, modern slavery plagues every country in the world – including the United States,” Miller said.”
So ya, happy slavery day. Maybe within my lifetime it can be a memorial day instead of a current events concern.
There is a prevailing view within the “progressive” community that religious tolerance (RT) is a virtue necessary for a just, egalitarian society. This is preposterous. Not only does RT have horrific implications, it is an “ideal” that I seriously doubt is actually held by its proponents. To begin with, lets take a look at what its advocates would like you to think RT means. RT means people are allowed to have whatever faith they want without fear of prosecution, persecution, or any other undesirable ‘ution’ and thus, RT would result in less hate crimes, violence, and a whole bunch of other nasty stuff we would rather be without.
The very first thing I’d like to point out is that all that nasty stuff that RT proponents say they’re trying to reduce can be dealt with much more efficiently. Instead of saying, “You’re not allowed to lynch someone or burn down their house just because they hold to a faith that differs from yours,” it would be much better to simply say, “You’re not allowed to lynch someone or burn down their house at all, for any reason”. The former of these maxims can be interpreted to mean that there are some circumstances which would allow one to lynch another, its just that differences in faith isn’t one of them. The second, however, makes things pretty clear. So this first short bit is just to show that basic protection laws make the common perception of RT irrelevant; if not a markedly inferior approach and a step in the wrong direction. That is just examining the possible benefits of RT. Let us analyze the completely ignored and adverse ramifications of RT.
RT would be a restriction on society, but not on individuals. This is very different from other egalitarian movements and why RT is dangerous. For example, tolerance of alternative sexual orientations is a two way street. Simply speaking, straight people are OK with gay people and gay people are OK with straight people. If it was only a one way street, then the ideal of the freedom to be with the consenting adult of your choice, regardless of their physiology, would be undermined.
RT, however, can only be one way. The community must accommodate the beliefs of the individual, but not the other way around. If one is allowed to adhere to any faith one wants to (as RT says one is) then if someones faith does not include RT, then that feature must be allowed and respected as well. Because RT is presented as a freedom of beliefs/values, and RT is itself a belief/value, proponents of RT cannot enforce RT on anyone without going back on the basic principles of RT.
So lets look at three people, each with very different faiths…
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…