But there’s the rub. There isn’t birth control and sex education for all because religious nuts are in control of local school boards and funding of sexual education. My tax dollars are paying to spread misinformation to sexually active teenagers. 16 year-old girls don’t hear about birth control and the morning after pill because they’re being force-fed abstinence only programs at school. If by some miracle they hear about the morning after pill, guess who won’t fill their prescription? Hell, it’s ignorant to say that we’re not directly affected by the abstinence only nonsense that’s helping spread AIDS in Africa.
Personally, I don’t have problems acquiring contraception, but I’m over 18, male, and well-informed about the options. When a 16 year old girl has a child that she can’t pay or care for, it takes a toll on me and the society I live in.
I think it was Plato who asked, “Is it good because God said it is good or does God say it is good because it is good?” So people have been pondering the origins of morality for many years now. I would like to add that just because there is a clear and absolute majority in the U.S. doesn’t mean what they want is right.
I think it’s important to remember religion as what it is. Plato’s question is a good one. Perhaps Religion is God dictated rules or not. That is for us to ponder and work to understand. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. However, religion has throughout history provided moral cohesion to a society. There are religions that lack such a thing as a God, like Buddhism for instance. What Buddhism does is provides a moral cohesion, therefore it is a religion.
This shows ignorance of history. Nothing more. They have everything to do with religion. Read some history books. There’s one that you hate the most, ‘The Bible’ which has defined the western values that you now hold more than any other book that has ever been written. If you want to present your case with any sort of gravitas, I’d recommend looking into how cultures viewed the notion of religion.
How from the Big Bang to present were morals developed then if it is irrelevant that ALL of our ancestors cultures were religious. I don’t find the argument that history doesn’t matter to the development of morals very compelling. It certainly isn’t a ‘reasonable’ position to take.
:rolleyes: This is a hysterical argument born out of fear and rage
Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion. It’s up to you to prove that it WAS a handicap. As we have no way of knowing whether we would have been better off without religion as we were never without it, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
People generally draw a line of differentiation between a culture of Law and despotism. You are certainly correct in some sense that Kings in some eras had the ability to make laws on whim. So you are free not to make that distinction if you so choose. The laws of the whims of Kings however, rarely endure past anyone who remembers his reign.
By whether or not they serve in any way to protect the public interest as opposed to simply codifying a purely ritualistic or religious prohibition. For example, a universal ban on eating non-kosher foods would be an attempt to legislate religious moralism. Laws against same-sex marriage (and until recently “sodomy” itself) are no more inherently sensible and serve no more non-religious purpose than my hypothetical attempt to enforce a universally kosher diet.
Attempts at anti-abortion laws and restrictions are similarly based on nothing but a religious belief that human zygotes are imbued with magical spirits. In my mind, the belief that blastocysts and embryos have “souls” is no more rational than the Hindu belief that cows carry reincarnated souls and attempts to ban abortion are quite analogous to laws in India prohibing the killing of cows.
Then, of course, there are those bald attempts to substitute patently religious beliefs for science in the classroom.
These things (with occasional exceptions) have been universally taboo in virtually all cultures. These kinds of moral prohibitions are products of evoluton and biology. We are evolved as a social animal and are brains are adapted to have adverse responses to behaviors which destabalize or threaten communities. Religion had nothing to do developing it. It just sprinkles a magical protection on that which is already there.
I seriously doubt that basic moral codes like not killing and stealing; or the even more basic ethical principles that underlie those, like reciprocity (“do unto others”) came about because ancient priests told the peasantry they would be smitten by the gods if they failed to obey; or because anybody sat down and reasoned out “Gee, I don’t like it when people take my stuff, and I certainly don’t think I’d like it if someone killed me. Maybe we can all come to an agreement that we’ll refrain from doing those kinds of things to each other, for the greater collective good, even if doing so would result in some immediate gain.”
We seem to have an innate capacity for having a moral code (in the same way we have an innate capacity for language), which capacity for morality stems from millions of years of evolution as social apes who live together in groups or bands. Like language, our moral sense seems to be a combination of some basic hard-wired rules on top of which is a whole elabarate superstructure of learned, culturally-based morals, which present a vast and bewildering array of variations on certain basic themes. (How many cultures don’t have some sort of prohibitions against killing, stealing, or messing about with another guy’s wife–at least not with respect to members of the “in group”; in many times and places killing, enslaving, raping, and stealing from those guys over the hill may be considered anything from OK to a divinely ordained duty, morally speaking.) (Especially in the case of morality, the non-biological culturally-specific superstructure may itself have been the product of “memetic” evolution by some form of natural selection, although I don’t know if that idea will ever be a real testable scientific hypothesis or anything more than a “Just So” story.)
I suspect religion came later, and was used to justify and reinforce the particular community’s specific moral code, but certainly not that religion or religious leaders invented the basic concepts of hominid morality, or that hominids got along with no moral instincts until one day they started believing in gods or Higher Powers. Also, the connection between religion or ideas about the gods, and morality or codes of behavior hasn’t always been as tight as it is in the Abrahamic religions; the Greek or Norse gods seem pretty thoroughly amoral and most stories about them are folk explanations of natural phenomena, or distorted or legendary historical stories, or who knows what, rather than tales of How One Ought to Behave.
Human beings are biologically hardwired with such things as an empathic response, nurturing instincts, paired bonding and tribal identification which greatly influence both individual behavior and cultural mores.
I don’t know what you mean by choice. There are obviously a number of free floating variables aside from innate biology which influence and condition behaviors.
I din’t believ in “free will,” if that’s what you mean.
Irrelevant to the codification and adoption of law based in morality.
And the systematization of such abilities means nothing to their evolution?
Ok, so is it a matter of biology and the random interaction of external chemicals and forces that our biologies interact with?
So some people are hardwired to be theists and some people are hardwired to be atheists? Are we then hardwired to be having this conversation? Hardwired to feel the way we will feel about it, and predestined to a determined level of reasoning capacity?
(Aside from the fact that someone’s already brought up pro-life atheists…)
I’m still wondering what makes a belief count as religious. If the belief that cows carry reincarnated souls and hence deserve legal protection is a religious belief, is the belief that they do not carry reincarnated souls a religious belief?
If the belief that zygotes have souls is a religious belief, is the belief that they do not have souls also a religious belief? Is the belief that newborn babies have “souls”—or whatever it is that makes them human beings deserving of legal protection—a religious belief? If not, why not, and at what point in the gestational/developmental process does belief in the baby’s right to live go from being a religious one to a non-religious one?
I’m still finding it very hard to nail down what should and should not count as “religion” for the purposes of this thread.
I would object this, not on the grounds that they are religious, but on the grounds that they are not scientific.
I wouldn’t call morality itself a biological imperative. It’s an adaptation which aids in the survival of human populations. Survival is a biological imperative, morality is just a tool (like fins for a fish).
Religion is a cultural artifact, not a biological one. I don’t know that anyone can definitively say what causes it, but it serves distinctive cultural and psychological roles within a society. It fills the human psychological need to impose order onto chaos, it reflects and codifies a shared biological sense of morality. It serves as a tribal identifier. It attempts to placate human curiosity about the universe. It offers consolation in the face of suffering and loss. It attempts to affect change in the environment and in individuals by means of magic and ritual. It attempts to quell the human fear of death. It was a multi-faceted, multi-tasking and probably unavoidable by-product of intelligent social apes living without the benefit of science.
I do not even disagree with this necessarily. What I was disagreeing with is the blithe dismissal of religion’s role in the moral life of our culture. I think social cohesion is a big part of religion’s function. Perhaps when all of the world is able to consider itself as a unified culture, religion’s function will cease to be applicable, but at this point in time I think it is as relevant as it ever was.