Morality vs. Religion

Great Debates
1

Obviously this is entirely anecdotal, and extremely subject to confirmation bias, but it’s always been my experience that the most moral–selfless, giving, noble, honest, honorable, insert your synonym of choice here–people I’ve known have been atheist or agnostic. While the most amoral–selfish, judgmental, vindictive, apathetic–are the ones who would identify religion as an important factor in their life.

And yet, it seems to me that the majority of people would reflexively align morality with religion. Thoughts?

2

Confirmation bias.

3

In my experience there is no correlation between morality and religiosity. There are many moral religious people, and many immoral religious people, and the same goes for non-religious people. Religion might make some people behave better, but it also makes some people behave worse.

4

Partly confirmation bias. Partly selection bias. For instance, nice, good, decent religious people tend to be quiet people. The ones whom you notice are the loudmouths and monsters.

Christian radio broadcasting is totally dominated by the monsters among the faithful. it’s rare to find a moderate and genteel Bible radio station. But, again, it’s a selection problem: moderates don’t sell as many ads or pull in as many donations as the shrill, cruel, hate-filled variety.

Atheists, for their part, generally create their own morality, and thus actually believe in it. Many Christians receive their moral teachings from outside themselves, and have not wholly internalized the lessons.

A very devout Christian once said to me, “Yeah, I’m gonna turn the other cheek…then I’m gonna deck the son of a bitch.” The fact that his kind is only a small minority is more than offset by the vehemence of his hypocrisy.

5

I think there’s a lot to this. In my limited, anecdotal, biased experience, the religious I’ve interacted with seem cavalier, thoughtless, unquestioning; while the non-religious seem to have more developed ideas because they didn’t adopt them wholesale but had to create them themselves to a large extent. Or at least cobble them selectively from a variety of sources.

Here’s my view: each of us spends our lifetime trying to fit a map of the universe within our minds, so that we have an understanding of where we are on that map. Religion is a kind of borrowed blueprint, a ghost-written autobiography. Or something. At least, it’s a response to that impulse to understand where we fit in. (So are science and art.)

In this attenuated metaphor, the prefab map represented by religion is like buying a suit off the rack, rather than tailoring a suit to fit your unique shape and experience.

6

God-fearing.

That would be quite astonishing!

Your morality is probably secular humanism, and so you’re going to see secular humanists as being highly moral.

7

I have to agree with Trinopus. One lesson I learned in Catholic school is that people should know that you are Christian by how you act, before you even open your mouth. The best way to witness for Christ is to live as He taught. Unfortunately, this lesson is lost on many people. I have met those that believe that you must loudly profess your faith, but who are as you describe in the OP. Unfortunately, those are the people who show up on the radar first.

8

I disagree. I think I defined my idea of morality pretty clearly with my list of synonyms. The argument I hear pretty often is that without religion, without the fear of everlasting torment or eternal reward, atheists have less incentive than believers to be moral. To which I call double bullshit. First, my “incentive” is that I’m a member of the human race, and I believe that there’s a *moral *contract inherent in my choice to live among a society among other human beings, pretty much covered by “the golden rule.” I feel bad when I do bad; I feel good when I do good. See? No religion needed. Second, it strikes me as suspiciously self-condemning for a believer to suggest that, absent their “fear” of god, they would have no morals. I see that as a HUGE moral failing, that one would need external enforcement in order to behave like a decent human being.

9

This also makes me more comfortable with “Cafeteria Christians,” who pick some Bible verses to live by, and other Bible verses to quietly ignore. They get a lot of disdain from their more fundamentalist brothers, but I think they’re on the right track. They’re “altering the suit to fit.” They’re keeping the baby, and pouring away the bathwater.

The fundamentalist wing is crashing, badly, awreck on the reef of the modern accommodation of homosexuality. But the believers who are willing to adapt their faith to the real needs of their practical morality are not having any real problem with gay rights. They’re able to push aside the (few!) Biblical verses which condemn gays. They’re defining their own morality, rather than letting ancient people in foreign lands tell them what is right and wrong.

(And, besides, any Christian who condemns gays…but wears clothing made of blended fibers…is already engaged in picking and choosing which Biblical commandments are relevant and which aren’t.)

10

I think religious people do bad things they wouldn’t do without religion (genital mutilation, being against birth control or certain types of medical treatments, supporting the acquisition of holy land, etc.) but in a general walking around the street everyday sort of situation there’s not much of a connection between morality and religious inclinations. Or if there is it works the opposite of how most people see it. Fundamentalist doctrine doesn’t make people crazy – the crazy people flock to fundamentalist doctrine. Or maybe that’s too naive, since people do grow up in it, but they leave it too once they realize how crazy it is.

For atheists it can work for bad or good. There’s no afterlife, we all have this one shot so be nice, right? Or since there’s no punishment do whatever the hell you want.

There’s been a couple studies that suggest that those who start to doubt humans have free will are more likely to act like jerks (which doesn’t make sense to me, but whatever). I think atheists are more likely to not believe in free will, so there’s a potential point against us.

11

Remove “God”. Insert “Police”.

12

You said “pick any synonym”. I picked “God-fearing”. How is an atheist “God-fearing”?

13

Sorry, that makes no sense.

14

What is it that you don’t understand about “God-fearing”? Some people will say that you need to be God-fearing in order to be a moral person. How can an atheist be moral under that assumption? Your rules said “pick any synonym”. If you want to put restrictions on the synonyms, then you need to modify the rules.

n.b.: That is not my belief, but I just chose that to show your own bias in selecting what makes a person moral. That is largely subjective.

15

In the US at least, the majority of people who “would identify religion as an important factor in their life” are at least nominally some form of Christian. Ironically, the Christ they claim to follow had some of his harshest words for, and some of his fiercest conflicts with, religious people. And you could find plenty of Biblical support for a condemnation of religious people.
I wonder whether, among the people that you have personal experience with, the atheists and agnostics tend to be the ones who have consciously chosen their path, their code to live by, while the religious people are the ones who tend to “go with the flow”; and if that has something to do with their relative levels of morality.
I think that, if a person is, to begin with, selfish, judgmental, vindictive, and/or apathetic, they may well find in religion a way to help them be more so, while at the same time feeling good about themselves despite, or even because of, those characteristics.
I am convinced, from direct and indirect personal experience, that not only are there good, moral religious people. I am convinced that religion can make a person better, more moral, more loving, more honorable, more unselfish—but also that religion can make a person worse.

16

[Addressed to John Mace:] It still doesn’t jibe. My list of synonyms were effects; yours is a putative cause. It doesn’t fit. I’m arguing that the effects of a moral outlook–selflessness, generosity, nobility, honesty, honor–are achievable without religion. Adding the fear of god to that list of the effects of a well examined, non-religious life is a total non sequitur.

Unless you’re suggesting that the fear of god is tautologically a moral good, an end in itself, which makes even less sense.

17

If John is doing anything besides pursuing a lame joke far past a reasonable point, I can’t tell. Are you, John?

I suspect Bricker is right, that confirmation bias plays into it. I’ve known some absolutely wonderful religious folk and some absolutely wonderful atheists, and crappy folks from all faiths or lack thereof as well.

More interesting, I think, would be to design an experiment. How would you test this belief? One possibility would be to lead games of Ultimatum and correlate results with religious beliefs/nonbeliefs. This experiment seems so obvious that surely it’s been done–does anyone know whether it has? Are there other similar experiments that track morality and faith?

18

I generally take a very expansive view of the definition of ‘religion’ as the process of making meaning. When we value - or devalue - things, experiences, ideas etc. we are acting religiously. Every person has their own frameworks for doing so that are constantly shifting and receiving input from outside and developing from within. Some of these frameworks use the practice of theistic belief, and similar frameworks often group themselves together under names like “Christian” or “Buddhist” or “Secular Humanist.” Some frameworks are grouped under ethnic or linguistic or national headings as culture or tradition. People can use multiple frameworks for assigning value at once that they might call religious, cultural, national, etc.

I don’t see anything inherently wrong with preferring some frameworks over others, or asserting that some are more effective at producing “moral” people than others. In many cases, this practice can be a vitally liberating act. Unfortunately, it is also not without its risks, and it is frequently prone to confirmation bias and faulty assumptions. One such faulty assumption is the idea that altering a framework such that the person assumes a new identity (for example, a Christian no longer identifying as Christian) severely affects all other parts of that framework, including their communal affiliations and their moral structures. Even if this does happen, it is not useful to assume that the effects will be as one predicts in the moment.

Furthermore, a lot of people in particular places have no personal experience with atheism or some other identity marker and have no idea what to assume about people who claim that label, or they have actively negative associations with that label. So their reaction might be one of distrust or hostility.

19

Couple of thoughts:

It’s obviously not the case that you need religion to be moral, or that religious people are on the whole more moral than non-religious people. Sophisticated and compelling moral reasoning is entirely possible without religion; just look at the philosophers of classical Greece, whose (non-religious) moral reasoning is still foundational for the western moral tradition (including, ironically, the Christian moral tradition).

I disagree with Trinopus that “atheists . . . generally create their own morality”. We all, believer and unbeliever alike, inherit a morality from our parents and our wider society. Part of growing up involves critically scrutinising that morality, and affirming, modifying or rejecting elements of it, but this process too is not carried on in a vacuum; it’s informed and shaped by our society and (since it goes on in adolescence) especially our peers. I really don’t see much evidence that believers and unbelievers arrive at very different conclusions. In fact, the degree of commonality between the dominant morality of believers in our society, and the dominant morality of unbelievers, is pretty striking, especially when you consider that there are both believers and unbelievers who assert that religious and non-religious moral thinking are fundamentally different processes.

I do think the impression mentioned in the OP is largely accounted for by confirmation bias. The real issue here is not the difference between religious and non-religious morality, but the distinction between living out moral convictions with integrity, and claiming moral superiority as a way of affirming oneself. (These aren’t fundamentally inconsistent - it’s possible to live a virtuous life and constantly call attention to it. The only virtue you compromise by doing that is humility.) If people are constantly banging on about morality, you’re more likely to notice that (and be judgmental of it) if they are people you disagree with.

Or, in other words, there are lots of people to whom religion is important, and who are not “selfish, judgmental, vindictive, apathetic”. They just don’t bring themselves to lissener’s attention. Conversely there are unbelievers who are complete shits, but either their shittiness doesn’t impact on lissener, or he doesn’t link it to their unbeliever status.

Finally, a footnote. It’s not a claim of any of the religious traditions dominant in the west that there believers are more moral than others, or that embracing religion makes you a more virtuous person. The dominant religious call their followers to live virtuously, but SFAIK none of them make any claim that religious faith is the only call to virtue, or the most compelling.

20

It would be interesting but I’m not sure what this would really tell us. That people who identify as people of faith are better/worse at adhering to their stated moral ideals than people who do not identify as people of faith?

It would be really hard to get something that even starts to be meaningful without testing across the world, over many time periods. Being a Christian in today’s Alabama is quite different from being a Christian in 1960s Korea, or being a Muslim in 1980s Argentina.