copernicus

Here is something that I just posted to the new <a href="http://pub5.ezboard.com/fzetoumenehoalethiafrm2.showMessage?topicID=5.topi c" target="_blank">ODD</a> forum. It was in response to a theist's question: Can atheists be moral people? Comments are welcome.

Children are not inherently moral. They develop a sense of right and wrong from adults who raise them. But one's sense of right and wrong changes over a lifetime. What seemed black and white as a child comes to be measured against the complexity of coping with adult realities. Most of us want to live in a society that provides us with safety, comfort, and happiness--the same thing that our parents gave us when we were children.

Here is my take on morality. It is essentially an extension of the "conscience"--our sense of right and wrong--that we learned as children. When we leave the family, religion continues to supply that external source of right and wrong that we came to accept as children. I am doing the "right thing", not because Mommy or Daddy told me it was right, but because God told me it was right. It is very hard to believe that our moral underpinnings have rational or pragmatic causes. Our parents didn't always try to justify or rationalize morality, and we don't need God to do that either.

But as adults, we do come to question what is right and wrong. That is part of growing up and that is why our values change, mutate, and refine themselves along the way. There is a practical value in treating others as you would have them treat you. It is good to care for people who are in need of help, because you would like others to treat you that way, too. Sometimes you sacrifice your one and only life for a good cause, because you want goodness to prevail for others.

Personally, I don't think that authority-driven "objective" morality is a good thing. It can lead to dangerous and perverse behavior--such as the fanatical 9/11 terrorists who so casually snuffed out the lives of thousands. If your heart tells you to be kind, but your God tells you to kill others for the Greater Good, then "objective" morality overrides subjective morality in a demented, evil cause. God can tell you to do anything and commit any moral outrage. Because God-driven acts are exempt from the subjective standards of others. "Objective morality" is nothing more than one's subjective opinion of authority-driven external morality.

My question would be different: Can religious people be truly moral people? Morality needs a rational basis, not in loco parentis authority.

luvluv

I think it is a mistake to think that all Christians believe certain things are good purely on the grounds that "God said so". I think that is, as you folks are fond of saying around here, a straw man. There are things in the Bible that I disagree with (like Paul's teachings about women not speaking in Church, and Paul's statements about every government being from God).

I also do not accept everything that every Christian authority figure says. I do use my brain and my experience to try to figure out what is right and wrong. By and large I think all humans do, theists or not.

Could a theist such as the one you described, one whose every moral decision is defined for him by an external authority, be considered moral? I don't know. But I think the real question is whether or not such a theist exists. I don't think I have ever met one.

luvluv

Check that. In retrospect, I think some theists like that do exist.

But I don't think that to be a theist means to never question external authority. Theiests, even those of the same religion, do not agree on everything.

ex-preacher

I think luvluv has answered the question quite well. A theist can only be moral to the extent that he/she is willing to disagree with what God commands when those commands are morally repugnant.

Example: Abraham was not moral when he chose obedience to God over the life of his son. A moral response would have been to stand up to God.

Alan Dershowitz has an excellent article on this subject which is somewhere in the II library.

echidna

Hey there copernicus. Are you not assuming that all theists are authority-driven ? I think we’d agree that this is clearly not the case. OK, most of the theists I know are liberal, but they follow their heart as much as any atheist. It’s simply the problem of presupposition which causes them to discuss in God’s authority.

When someone asks the question “why is it wrong to harm the innocent ?”, it is a very difficult answer to say “well it’s just my opinion”. For instance personally I would prefer a world where it was objectively wrong to harm the innocent as I think most people would. So when a child asks, I think it is quite fair to respond with “well it is”, or the theistic version “because God says so”. In many ways it’s an ugly world with no justice, no right and wrong. It’s also much more difficult to assert a moral position without some point of presupposition. In the end, most people receive far more of their morality from their parents than anywhere else, so “why” can easily become another pointlessly infinite regression, as we all know from our own childhoods or parenthoods.

In much of theology God is equated with righteousness & one logically places Godly intelligence above righteousness, however there are many theists who find the two inseparable. To them Godliness is righteousness. As such, following one’s heart, is following God’s authority. The story of Abraham is an excellent parable to illustrate the distinction between righteousness and godliness, and the problems of authoritarianism.

Where authority-driven theists fall off the rails is where they assume the divine intelligence and that selected earthly persons are privy to knowledge of God which they are not, and end up simply following the authority of those persons.

Quick answer : yes (I hope you’re not suggesting that only atheists are moral people )

luvluv

ex-preacher, I don't think it is so cut and dry. What if, after all, the central authority is right, and the dissenter wrong?

Are children more moral when the disobey their parents and have sex when they are minors then if they were to obey their parents and wait?

I don't think you can say that when a person disobeys authority that person is being moral, and when he obeys it his morality is meaningless. There are occasionally great social consequences to certain requirements of obedience. To be celibate, for example, in this culture, would require extreme self-discipline and sacrifice. It would also entail some social isolation. The same with someone who refuses to drink alcohol. You are also assuming that the central authority that the religious leader is following is the same central authority that governs his fellows. A fellow like, say Martin Luther King followed a central authority that in his mind set him against the order of the day (segregation). He risked great harm to himself in disobeying one central authority (the law) in order to obey another (God). So is his morality meaningless? And does he not get points for disobeying all the other central authorities (custom, law, social status, etc.) in order to obey God?

I don't know that someone who commits moral acts in the absence of authority is better than someone who does it in the presence of authority. I also don't believe that the theists who do moral acts based on their belief in God necessarily are doing it "because God said so." Like you, quite often they are responding out of their immediate human compassion. For some aspects of the religious life, (like celibacy, for instance) one does have to rely quite heavily on God, because it is something that one does not want to do. But every moral action that a Christian commits is not necessarily forced upon him by authority.

[ April 07, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

copernicus

Thanks for your comments luvluv, echidna, and ex-preacher. You are correct in criticizing me for painting all theists with the same brush in my initial statement. That is not what I believe, and it is certainly not true that only atheists can be moral. I was addressing the authoritarian basis of theistic morality as a so-called "objectivist morality". The atheist is often said to have a "subjectivist morality". And my little essay was directed at the post in the ODD forum.

I happen to agree with all of you that most theists have a more complex morality. They do not just blindly follow a narrow interpretation of "scripture", although, as luvluv admitted, some do. It is the ones that do rely too much on religious authority for their moral code that can be truly dangerous. If God wants you to commit murder, then is that then a good act? Andrea Yates answered it one way, but most theists would find it extremely difficult to believe that God wanted them to commit such an act.

What I find interesting about this discussion is that atheists and theists are not really all that different when it comes to morality. They just rationalize their morality differently. It is extremely difficult for theists to reconcile their authoritarian approach to morality with the very arbitrary nature of authorities. When confronted with arguments of this sort, theists often retreat to the position that "God would never want that, so I don't have to concede your point." Religious fanatics can commit atrocities in the name of religion, but you still can't have a moral code without religion. Ergo, the fanatics must be following a perverted form of religion.

What puzzles me is how theists can so blithely assert that atheists have no "objective" basis for morality when it is clear from history that people with deep religious convictions can behave in any way you can imagine. If religious morality is "objective", then why are there so many contradictory interpretations of the same scripture? The fact is that religous doctrine does not really serve as a moral compass. People are capable of building compasses that point in any direction. Theists have the illusion that all of their compasses are pointing north. And that is why their behavior ends up being scattered all over the map.

ex-preacher

That's why I said "when those commands are morally repugnant."

There are plenty of morally repugnant commands given by God in the Bible. The sacrifice of Isaac (or Ishmael if you're Muslim) is only one example. Is murder wrong when God orders the hit?


<strong> Certainly. But for the person who believes that an eternal reward awaits those who obey while an eternal hell awaits those who disobey, then it's not really a hard choice, is it? Doing the right thing is always good. Doing the right thing when you know you will be richly rewarded is not that praiseworthy. Doing the right thing and expecting no reward and even a possible punishment (with no eternal compensation) is the highest good.

<strong> I don't think you can show that MLK believed that God commanded him to oppose segregation. If he believed that his actions would earn him heaven, then it's hard for me to see that any earthly sacrifice was too burdensome.

In my book, true honesty is telling the truth when you know you could get away with a lie. Telling the truth when you know that a lie would be caught is still the right thing, but it is no astounding display of moral strength.

The truly moral thing for Abraham to have done would have been to defy God. Agree?

Here's the Dershowitz link (sorry for the bad formatting).

<a href="http://www.beliefnet.com/frameset.asp?pageLoc=/story/92/story_9263_1.html&boardID=27945" target="_blank">www.beliefnet.com/frameset.asp?pageLoc=/story/92/story_9263_1.html&boardID=27945</a>

echidna

Luvluv, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, what do you think is more likely ?

A. God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son to test him, and once his willingness to do so was proven, asked for a goat to be sacrificed in his place.
B. Somebody wrote an insightful story many many centuries ago.

FWIW, either way it’s a valuable parable on which to discuss morality, conscience versus authority. Unpopular as I am for my apologism (?), I find the Bible an excellent text to clearly demonstrate that 2000 years haven’t changed our struggle when it comes to problems of morality.

The concept that we each best know Moral Behaviour can be a dangerous one IMO, generally the younger one is. Without some degree of at least parental authoritarianism, rationalism alone can often lead to a Contractarian Morality which to my understanding I find quite repulsive, in fact equally as repulsive as authoritatian morality. So as such, whether one uses the theistic version “coz God said so”, or the atheist version “coz it is”, a child is far better to listen to these than simply “coz I’m telling you”.

There are some very fundamental problems to which I find the following quite adequate :

Why is X wrong ?
Because it is.

Copernicus, I think you’ll find that there are core humanist tenets of all religions which are the same, such as compassion and integrity. As I see it, it’s only in the implementation where it all turns to the tragically ridiculous.

Vorkosigan

Certainly, to the extent that theists incorporate secular values like independence of thought, tolerance, and the like, theists can behave in a moral fashion.

Are children more moral when the disobey their parents and have sex when they are minors then if they were to obey their parents and wait?

It always comes back to sex with you.....there isn't any moral issue here that I can see. One side gives orders that are cruel and unforceable, and the other indulges in normal and natural behavior. For this issue, orders are a bad strategy. And yes, I have two kids.

In any case, you are perfectly correct to point out that sometimes authority is right. But on the whole, people are better off relying on thoughtful exploration of moral issues, independent of authority. This will produce a society that maximizes personal potential, wealth, freedom and security.

Michael