This is also entirely anecdotal, but I must dispute your first assertion. I’ve known atheists and agnostics that fit your laundry list of moral qualities, and I’ve known those that didn’t. I can say the same for the religious folk I’ve known.
I have no religion, but I am not amoral, and I am not unique in that way. Perhaps many do associate morality with religion, but one is not a prerequisite for the other.
As far as I know most of the evidence leans towards that being true; in most of the studies I’ve ever heard of atheists/agnostics come out ahead morally. More inclined to altruism, more trustworthy, more honest, less violent, etc. Which is probably why such studies aren’t done very often. One example.
Because making religion look good is a central part of selling religion, and of demonizing the opponents of that religion. If someone doesn’t claim that their religion/religion in general is the source of morality, then they can’t demonize unbelievers as monsters.
That’s mainly because the religious side of the debate in the West has in comparison to the past been severely beaten down into conforming to the secular side. Just look at a place like Saudi Arabia to see what a society is like when religious “morality” is dominant.
:dubious: Since when? What you are saying is the exact opposite of reality; all the polls show that most people strongly believe that religion makes you moral and that not being religious makes you immoral. At least in America - are you an American? If you aren’t that might explain it.
I agree with most of the posters above; that you’ll find good and bad people inside and outside of religion.
I will add a couple of things though.
In the UK, people generally aren’t very religious, but among the older generation (60+) I have noticed a slight correlation between being religious and doing volunteer work. Not sure exactly why. It doesn’t seem to apply to younger people.
The other thing is that although religion is largely built upon our instinctive feelings of right and wrong, and fairness, a successful religion must add a few arbitrary rules. That way people feel they’re learning something and/or sacrificing something. Such arbitrary rules can of course lead to “good people doing bad things” e.g. not allowing a life-saving blood transfusion.
If you step outside the list made by the OP and others I think an argument can at least be made.
Most of the major religions have some serious issues treating women as actual human beings. Even if its as simple as not allowing them to be leaders in the church. The act of not treating women as full equals to men I personally would consider that to be morally questionable at best. The second area is probably a bit more contentious, Raising children to believe impossible to prove poorly considered nonsense about the universe as if it were true (IMHO) is child abuse. While I am not saying either of these things is exclusive to religion they are both largely the default position of much if not most of the worlds religions.
But religious people presumably feel bad when they do bad as well. But on top of that they have the fear of everlasting hellfire. Both logic and common sense overwhelming suggests that they should therefore be more moral. The score is 2-1 after all.
There’s also no evidence that I’m aware that supports the hypothesis supported by common sense and logic. Which is rather surprising from a 19th century perspective. The evidence below is also not consistent with the 2-1 hypothesis.
We test whether religious affiliation and participation in religious services affect cooperative behavior in a repeated public goods games played by adult subjects. The level of contributions to the public good is not influenced by either religious affiliation or participation. However, the decline in group account contributions with repetition of the game is smaller among religious subjects than those who report no religious affiliation, suggesting that religious beliefs may be beneficial for sustained cooperation. Comment: See figure 1. Protestants had a constant level of cooperation. The non-religious had an increase in cooperation early on, followed by a steady decline. I haven’t read the paper, but I’m wondering whether the non-religious were pursuing a tit for tat strategy. We evaluated group- and individual- level effects of religion on prosocial behavior across the three games. Although playing the games in a religious setting showed no overall difference as compared to a secular setting, we did find a weak association between some individual-level dimensions of religiosity and behavior in some of the games. The weak association between religion and behavior is consistent with theory and empirical studies using similar measures – the anonymous pairing and grouping of the economic games may moderate individual-level effects of religion. My takeaway: “Weak association between religion and behavior.”
I think my 3rd link is a research plan to organize and ultimatum game among various cultural groups. No, I haven’t read any of those papers: I spent maybe 1 minute with each one.
UDS is from Australia. Cite.
Christian fundamentalism is an American invention.
Sure, but all of us borrow most aspects of our world view from elsewhere. It is not just the religious who do so. Modern world views, those of atheists included, are the product of thousands of years of human intellectual development. No-one is capable of coming up with a sophisticated moral system out of their own, completely untutored, resources, any more then they would be capable of coming up with modern scientific theory out of their own head.
One thing I will say for the religious, they rarely seem to suffer from the same sort of massive conceit about their own intellectual resources that far too many atheists seem to suffer from.
It’s quite possible that particular expressions of morality are positively correlated with religiosity. Religions are not just a set of beliefs; they usually also involve a set of relationships and often an organisation. And those relationships and that organisation might sustain ethical behaviour like volunteering in a more effective way simply holding similar beliefs about what is ethical would do. It’s probably not a coincidence that institutions like public hospitals and universities emerge from the religious tradition; not that you needed to be religious to see these things as good, but that you needed to be religious to actually make these things happen. Or, at least, it helped.
Of course, the converse could also be true. There may be other forms of ethical behaviour that are positively correlated with unbelief. Or there may be forms of unethical behaviour (judgmentalism, shunning) that are positively correlated with religion.
I dunno Bill Buckley wasn’t known for his humility.
I’m guessing that most (not all) secular moralities are variants of utilitarianism or at least a moral calculus. Practitioners of such an approach do not need to reinvent the wheel, but there does involve some adaptation to circumstance. Weighing costs and benefits are an essential aspect of the paradigm after all.
Actually, I’m Irish, but I have been living in Australia for the past ten years or so.
On the question of whether religion involves the claim that religion makes you moral, I suspect there may be a divide here between the authoritative teachings of various religions, and popular attitudes. I’d be reasonably confident that none of the major Christian, Jewish or Islamic traditions teaches that being a believer makes you more moral. But I’d cheerfully accept that, at least in the US and other countries influenced by Puritanism, many individual believers do think that it does, regardless of what they are formally taught. And of course you have unbelievers who hold the reverse (and probably for similar reasons).
Yup. I often say that anyone who actually wants to be President doesn’t deserve it. Anyone who goes out of their way to get your attention and publicize their beliefs probably has an agenda for it. Most Christians I know are kind, decent people, FWIW.
And I wouldn’t say atheists are universally moral and selfless, either. Every few months you hear about some jackass who files a lawsuit over a public prayer, a religious monument, or tries to protest some religious event. As a hardcore atheist myself, I have adopted the philosophy that I am not required to give a damn one way or the other about what someone else believes.
Not so sure about this. Being an atheist doesn’t make you a Nietzchean ubermensch. Basically everyone inherits their morality through their family and culture… which, in the west, is completely dominated by Judeo-Christian beliefs and values. So while there are certain religious teachings that I reject entirely, I would not go so far to as to say I have invented my own moral code in a vacuum.
Which, in turn, took on a huge amount from the (largely non-religious) ethical thinking of classical Greece. There isn’t a necessary fundamental difference between theistic and non-theistic ethical reasoning, and each tradition (if we can even call them separate traditions) can and does draw on the other. Its not surprising that theistic and non-theistic ethical reflections frequently arrive at very similar conclusions.
Oh, come on; they think that they have a pipeline to Cosmic Truth handed down from the One True God. How is that not an example of “massive conceit”? Conceit is a central part of religion; the believer is more enlightened than the non believer, humans are central to the universe/a significant concern of the god or gods, and so on. The concept of faith is in itself massively conceited.
An attitude that won’t save you from all the religious people who do think that they are required to care what you believe. It’s those “jackasses” who are at least trying to do the job of saving you, along with everyone else.
Because you left out a few things. One of the lesser ones is that morality in a religious context is credocentric: what god wants/requires may not be consistent with a more objective morality (e.g., “suffer not the unbeliever …”). But god’s goals are paramount, so if some non-faithful person gets stepped on in pursuit of divine ends, that is not necessarily a bad or immoral thing.
But perhaps the most important issue that has been passed over so far is that some religions, like christianity, give the believer an out: jesus shed his precious blood to wash away your sins, therefore (being a victim of original sin and thus predestined to misbehave), you can get right with him when you do stray and the hazard of hell will be staved off.
And as far as the forgiveness thing goes, it comes without limitations, conditions or restrictions. As long as you keep up on your repentance and fail to die at the wrong moment (while not in a state of grace), you can sin all the hell you want. Jesus will always be there to redeem you. Just be sure to be sorry every time.
My experience has been opposite to yours.
To expand on your point: in Judaism, there is an express teaching that it is completely unnecessary to be Jewish to be a “moral person”. This is derived Biblically - that is, Jews all agree that Noah was a moral person (he was saved from the flood because he was moral), and of course, he wasn’t Jewish - as Judaism did not exist yet, assuming (for this purpose) the myth is historical.
Also, Noah, a moral man, was the ancestor of all existing humanity: therefore, all humanity has the potential to be moral, if it follows certain basic teachings as followed by the ancestor Noah. These laws are known as the “Noahide Laws”, or “Seven Laws of Noah”; all non-Jews who follow them are considered just as moral as Jews who follow the laws of Judaism. Notably, belief in God is not required (although one is forbidden to practice “idolatry” or to commit “blasphemy”, there is no positive injunction to believe in, or worship, a god or God - although of course Noah did, what with talking with Him and all).
In short, in Judaism at least it is perfectly possible for a non-believer in any gods to be considered “just as moral” as the most believing Jew - as long as they follow these laws.
I was doing well up until the Prohibition of Sexual Immorality. Depending on how strict your interpretation is the Prohibition of Blasphemy most likely would have taken me out of contention as well.
There Can Be Only One!
I don’t notice any correlation at all.
All Christians are “Cafeteria Christians”. First, even those who heed all books in the Bible equally are using a reference whose chapters were selected from a larger set of possible texts. But I don’t know of any denominations that heed all the texts. Of course, the OT has to be filtered by the effect of Christ’s salvation, but ignoring that, large parts of the NT are often dismissed without much comment.
And they’re pretty much not basing that on the NT, which never actually mentions it other than in lists of sins, using an ambiguous term usually translated as “sodomy”.
Well, there’s that filter I mentioned above. But your point is still valid given that the most explicit text regarding homosexuality is in Leviticus, sandwiched between how much to pay for slaves and that women mustn’t cook for men during their periods, and must wear hats in the temple, and a whole lot of other nonsense that protestants ignore. I don’t know why the filter applies to these sins but not homosexuality.
Yeah, he opened that door and shouldn’t have.
My parents would very strongly state that extramarital sex is immoral, and I disagree. Clearly, morality isn’t something we all agree on. A better debate topic might have been John Adam’s statement, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people”. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” I agree with the “moral” part but not the “religious” part. But, that’s not what the OP asked.
He said “the same” conceit. That’s a different kind of conceit. The statement was qualitative, not quantitative, so your objection doesn’t quite follow.
Great! The last time that was said it spawned 5 or 6 spinoff movies and 3 television series. :smack: 