Board index ‹ Morality

[Big Tiny]

I personally think that, no, you do not need religion to have a moral belief system. Some people do require religion to have morals, but I think that religion is often exploited to justify unethical/unmoral actions. I want to hear what you guys have to say as Phil Robertson stated recently;

“I’ll make a bet with you,” Robertson said. “Two guys break into an atheist’s home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters. Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him. And then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot them and they take his wife and then decapitate her head off in front of him. And then they can look at him and say, ‘Isn’t it great that I don’t have to worry about being judged? Isn’t it great that there’s nothing wrong with this? There’s no right or wrong, now is it dude?’”

Robertson kept going: “Then you take a sharp knife and take his manhood and hold it in front of him and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if this [sic] was something wrong with this? But you’re the one who says there is no God, there’s no right, there’s no wrong, so we’re just having fun. We’re sick in the head, have a nice day.’”

“If it happened to them,” Robertson continued, “they probably would say, ‘something about this just ain’t right.”

The section from that I want to focus on is;

'Isn’t it great that I don’t have to worry about being judged? Isn’t it great that there’s nothing wrong with this? There’s no right or wrong, now is it dude?'

I don't think this section can be misinterpreted, but I know this isn't the opinion of all theists.

Just to full state my opinion;

Religion is not needed to have moral/ethical values, a person can develop their own morals as easily as they can reject religious ones to favor their own actions. As important as religious morals are to some people it is often exploited to justify unethical actions by quoting parts of their religious text of choice while atheism doesn't have something like that to fall back on.

I want to add that I'm not saying that atheism is superior to religion in terms of morals, but more so that religion can be exploited to violate moral/ethical beliefs.

[jimwalton]

Thanks for the question. Yeah, blah blah Robertson. I'd rather not comment on him, but go to your question instead.

You don't need religion to have morals, but without religion there is no objective basis for your moral system. If your morals are based on "the good of society," even Hitler and Stalin felt they were serving the good of society in their murderous genocides, as were the butchers in Rwanda and their genocidal mayhem. There is a fluid definition of "the good of society".

Others might claim that "Morals is what I perceive to be good." And that can work, but maybe not. What you perceive to be good is obviously and necessarily self-oriented, and people are too easily self-deceived.

Ultimately being moral is often at odds with self-interest, because it usually involves some action in the interest of others or a greater good, possibly to the detriment of oneself. If there is no God no heaven, and no hell, there is simply no persuasive reason to be moral.

If you admit that there is such a thing as evil (that evil exists), then you must assume that good exists in order to know the difference. "Good" and "bad" can only make sense if we can perceive them as antithetical, and they can only then be defined if there is some standard by which they can be evaluated. There has to be an objective standard by which they can be measured, or they are relative, and therefore meaningless. But if there is an objective standard, it must lie outside of ourselves, and there must have been something (or someone) that was the source of that objective standard.

This is not to claim there is no rationality without God, and no goodness. Of course there is, but there is no way to define goodness without God. Objective moral values exist only if God exists. No one thinks it's OK to mutilate babies for the fun of it. No one ever did, anywhere, anytime. We know that objective moral values do exist, and therefore God must exist.

Thinking atheists corroborate. J.L. Mackie said, "We might well argue...that objective intrinsically prescriptive features, supervenient upon natural ones, constitute so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events, without an all-powerful God to create them."

Joel Marks says, "The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. I call the premise of this argument 'hard atheism.' ... A 'soft atheist' would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality.  And indeed, the whole crop of 'New Atheists' are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality."

Richard Dawkins says that his belief that rape is wrong is just as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers rather than six.

William Provine, biology professor from Cornell University: "Modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society … We must conclude that when we die, we die, and that is the end of us … finally, free will as it is traditionally conceived—the freedom to make un-coerced and unpredictable choices among alternative courses of action—simply does not exist … There is no way that the evolutionary process as currently conceived can produce a being that is truly free to make moral choices."

That's not to say people who don't believe in God believe in rape and genocide. That's ridiculous. It's just to say that they have no real GROUNDS for believing what they believe except, "That's what I think is right." Nor is it to claim that atheists can't live a moral life; they can. But the only reason to believe that something is right or wrong is (1) if there is a standard, as I said, and (2) if there's a reason to believe that there is such a thing. As I've asserted, if we are simply matter + time + chance, evolved by random processes, and survival is our modus operandi, then "truth" (and therefore "right" and "good") are not intrinsically part of the equation AND CAN'T BE. Nor can "purpose" or "reason." All we are is chemicals.

But couldn't consciousness and "good" have evolved? No, because there's no rational source for it. If we evolved truly by chance (like "shuffle" on your iPod), then "shuffle" is the only source in the system. You can't say to your iPod, "Oh, GOOD choice." It wasn't a choice, and therefore it wasn't good. It's random. So with ALL of life without objective morality.