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Everyone knows that in order to be a good moral religious conservative, all you need is a closet full of semi-auto rifles and a disdain for minorities. The more guns in the hands of people going off on sidewalks, subways, grocery stores, parks, etc...the more moral and pleasing we are to God.
An intellectually honest Athiest will, simply, never use the word "moral"...the ones who want to have a stronghold on context will but they will also tell you there is nothing inherent about their own value system because they simply cannot construct an argument without subjectivity.
It's why I am not an Athiest but an Agnostic...I can say in 100% confidence that I don't know if there is a GOD like we are prescribed by the Bible...and I really don't care..and my values are just that, mine.
Moral: "Concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character."
Nothing about that inherently requires a God of any kind.
Everyone knows that in order to be a good moral religious conservative, all you need is a closet full of semi-auto rifles and a disdain for minorities. The more guns in the hands of people going off on sidewalks, subways, grocery stores, parks, etc...the more moral and pleasing we are to God.
Or you could just beg for the protection of a government that will, eventually, hold you down and pound you in the a**
It's only happened with virtually every government ever in the history of mankind.
A couple of points and for the record I guess you can call me a "agnostic"
Full disclamer: There have been many, many studies done on reincarnation (Ian Stevenson at the Univesity of Virginia). Even atheist and author Sam Harris has stated its either the greatest hoax in history or there might be something there with reincarnation. I go by facts though and I like proof when it comes to these things.
Organized religion is cultural (duh). Is Christianity really a great religion? The answer is no. In 300 AD you could be killed for being a Christian in the Roman Empire, by 400 AD, you could be killed for not being a Christian. It was Constantine the great who should be the second most credited for the religion known as Christianity. Understand that as the Roman Empire spread to most of Europe, so did Christianity. When the Europeans colonized many parts of the world, what religion did they force down on the natives?
Answer! Christianity. Now that we have this in our minds, lets look at the question. Does religion (or lack of it) effect morals? The answer is yes. Does it make it right? I guess, that is up to the individual to decide. The Christian bible we have today was used to defend slavery.
Today, some use it to attack homosexuals. Ancient Greece had homosexuals, African tribes, Americas etc. This is something that if anyone took the time to read biology and anthropology, would understand is engraved in some humans and has been forever. Relgion (the religion we know), was created by man. We pick and choose what we want to follow in our bible based on our own beliefs.
So without writing a 35 page article on this subject which is near and dear to my heart, I will answer with "yes" and "no". For some people I believe they need religion to be moral people, for others I would say they do not. But morality is in the eye of the beholder.
Generally speaking liberals are more immoral when it comes to traditional values like unwed parenthood, etc. Conservatives are more immoral when it comes to issues like corporations getting more from tax payers than people.
Honestly, it isn't just organized religion where that is true. Communism killed far more than religion in at least the last century. However, with communism, "the state" or "collectivism" took the place of a supernatural being in terms of being the tool to enslave men. As many were slaughtered for "the common good" or "the betterment of society" as were for forced conversion to a different religion. And for much the same reason. Reason and rationality were tossed out in return for a irrational belief that personal interests, goals and accomplishments must be sacrificed for either the good of "society" or god. Both were equally evil. Faith or force, both are the enemies of reason. Like most anything, follow the money. Someone was out to gain with either scheme.
Meh, where it pertains to communism, the whole "lack of religion" thing is overblown. The communists behaved no worse than their predecessors who were blessed by the church.
In fact, in the case of Stalin, one must wonder why if the Christian faith acts as some sort of agent for good in people, why didn't it work on him? He spent his entire youth dedicated to religious service.
Hell, Hitler was raised a catholic in a nation that was not only one of the most catholic nations in Europe, but the nation that was the most dedicated to Nazism once it took hold. Imagine that.
But sure, communism and fascism has killed millions, but those body counts are NOTHING compared to what religion has racked up.
Has religion done ANY good in this world? Yes...but overall in the grand scheme, the good is flat out negligible and outweighed by the bad a million times over.
Why people ascribe things like morality to religion goes over my head. Religion is nothing more than mankind's first attempt to explain phenomena that science can EASILY explain at this point, hence making religion obsolete.
Religion has done nothing to deserve the attribution of moral and decent.
Yes it does...because "right" and "wrong" and "goodness" and "badness" outside the scope of law, which is also preference, is subjective.
I feel that you must have read a lot of Christian literature in your day to have come to that conclusion.
Quote:
The philosophical clouds of confusion quickly disperse when we simply appeal to the Golden Rule, the root of our moral intuitions. It is an objective rule because it is based on an objective principle of moral symmetry which constrains any morally valid statement concerning person A and person B to be invariant under an interchange of the two persons, everything else being equal. Specifically:
Person A can discern if action X affecting person B is moral if person A would be willing to be subject to action X by person B (everything else being equal).
This statement is symmetric under an interchange of person A and person B. It is an objective way for anyone to know if there actions are moral. The same formula can be written to objectively define the moral value of any action X:
An action X by person A affecting person B is moral if and only if person A would be willing to be subject to action X by person B (everything else being equal).
It is an objective standard because it’s truth value does not depend on any particular individual (confusions relating to the subjective “willingness” of person A will be dealt with in a future article). It is a satisfying theory of morality because it tells us why something is moral. It is nothing but a precise formulation of the Golden Rule, the most universal moral principle, explained in terms of moral symmetry. It is analogous to the symmetry constraints used to derived fundamental laws of physics. For example, the law of conservation of angular momentum can be derived from the rotational symmetry of space by Noether’s Theorem. It is also similar to the Pauli Exclusion Principle which imposes a symmetry constraint on the quantum state vector and so explains the structure of the atom. Thus our deepest moral intuitions are formally similar to the logic that led to our greatest insights into the fundamental nature of physical reality.
There is much more to say (involving love, for example) and many details to work out (such as objections involving psychopaths and masochists, the meaning of “everything else being equal,” etc.) which will be the subject of a series of articles. But nothing can detract from the profound depth, beauty, and simplicity of this line of reasoning to understand the root and reality of our moral intuitions. I am confident that this argument will yield an intellectually satisfying and robust theory of objective morality.
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