Posted by Mush on 08.29.2010, 09:50 PM:
quote: Originally posted by Roarkiller
Disbelief in god -> disbelief in heaven/hell -> disbelief in the need for morality -> do the math
Roarkiller, while I certainly respect your religious beliefs, you know it's a failing of mine that I can't let this one slip by. I hereby do the math and challenge all of your logical arrows.
Is disbelief in god a precondition for disbelief in heaven/hell? Certainly not. Many religions with a concept of "god" have no concept of heaven or hell, such as Judaism (which to my knowledge doesn't say much about the afterlife at all), Taoism, and Scientology.
Is belief in god a precondition for belief in heaven/hell? Arguably not. Buddhism certainly has a hell, although it doesn't really have a "god" in the normal sense (whether abrahamic or pagan). Presumably other religions do to; I'm hardly an expert.
Personally, I feel that an omnipotent god and an afterlife based on reward or punishment of actions are rather contradictory beliefs. While I'm sure that many religious texts have chapters to address this issue, I don't think that god could really have some intention for how people should behave ("god's will" and also allow us to behave otherwise. I suppose it's a free will issue. (Interesting that the Abrahamic god was willing to "harden Pharaoh's heart" and make him act in a way contrary to the ten commandments, but I digress...).
Of course, some religions posit a god of limited power, who can't control human actions, but still wants us to do good things. And so brandishes heaven as a kind of carrot-on-a-stick to encourage us to act according to a set of morals. That to me is not a logical contradiction, but it's not a god that I feel particularly compelled to believe in. Mainly because such a god would seem to have rather little faith in humanity, if 'he' thinks that we can't figure out for ourselves that killing is wrong. And also because such gods often seem to endorse killing, on occasion, as long as the victims are nonbelievers. Nonbelievers who god (for his own amusement?) usually didn't do the favor of attempting to persuay directly with his booming voice, the way he did with the believers.
Okay, but that aside: does disbelief in heaven/hell lead to a disbelief in the need to morality?
First off, a good many of my friends are Jews, Taoists, and fire-and-brimstone atheists, and they are perfectly moral despite not having heaven or hell per se. While I consider myself open-minded about the possibility of some god, I do not at all believe in heaven or hell afterlife justice system. That strikes me more as a childish manipulation of our base fears, thrown into holy texts as a threat by theocrats to prop themselves up. Not something that someone godly would use.
Why would an atheist not murder people for fun, if they don't think they'll go to hell for it? Because they fear getting arrested? If human morals rest on a system of penalties, then that's the next biggest one. So are the police the only ones standing between us and mobs of atheist sociopaths? This would lead me to hope that the police officers themselves aren't atheists. Or, do they fear rejection and isolation from religious family members and friends? I find that also unlikely, given that religious parents tend to have religious children and atheist parents tend to have atheist children. (By "tend to" I mean that the probability is elevated, and while I could source data for this, it should be self-evident based on the generational consistency of religious demographics. Were it not the case, Israel, Pakistan, Iran, the USA, and other countries would over decades experience either massive immigration/emmigration, or dissolve into a mosaic of multiculturalism). And surely amoral atheist children would not fear rejection from their amoral atheist parents for acting immorally.
We can look at social science to see if religiosity collaborates with measures of improved morals. (It is not simple though, because strongly religious communities tend to deal with moral transgressions internally and under-report them; ie, shotgun weddings). Here's one paper of many, which I think states the point reasonably well: Rates of murder, abortion, suicide, and teenage pregnancy do correlate with religious observance... but not in the way that you might expect. In less religious countries, performance on all these social metrics actually improve. The author even writes "The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted."
Personally, I think morals come from within. I usually don't need an overlord (whether god, the state, or my parents) to tell me that killing is wrong, that stealing is bad, that charity is good. I absolutely know this is true of myself, and I strongly suspect that this is true of most other people.
I do believe that we humans have a tendency to fall victim to mob mentality. If times are tough and a charismatic, strong-armed, screaming leader plays off of people's pain, then we as individuals are capable of unspeakable acts of inhumanity. I've heard stories from holocaust survivors, I've heard stories from witnesses at the Xinjiang riots, I've read Romeo Dallaire's account of the Rwandan genocide, I've met Israeli and Palestinian citizens caught up in the conflict, and then there's 9/11... it's terrible. What people will do to each other sometimes, the horrors are just unbelievable. Religion or no religion, people can be absolutely inhumane, and it seems like it doesn't always take much of a push.
I think religion provides at best a rudimentary safeguard against this behaviour, by telling us to be good to each other, but at worst actually makes us more vulnerable to it because it encourages its own kind of group-think. Sometimes, it can even be exploited in ways that go against religious teachings themselves, but nonetheless it still acts as a powerful enabling tool for those who would use it.
In my opinion, the best safeguard is for people to turn to themselves, to always challenge themselves, and not to seek approval for their actions from holy texts or leaders of any sort. Because, I think, we're our own strongest judges, and if we ever stop asking ourselves what is right and what is wrong, we can hardly expect anyone else to do a better job of filling in the blanks. Now, this is my own opinion and anyone is free to differ.
It is my understanding, though, that this is actually the core of the Islamic principle of itijihad; that we must always think and interpret for ourselves, rather than entrust our judgement to any other authority.
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