Religion and Morality

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The Chinese situation is likely to change as missionaries are hard at work trying to make converts in the former Communist nations. No doubt they want China's stats to look more like South Koreas. But I don't expect they ever will.

As for religion forming the moral basis of cooperation in social animals, I doubt that very much. According to Caesar the Germanic tribes of the 1st century BC were extremely primitive, had no agriculture and no advanced religion. They made gods of things they could see, like the sun, the moon or fire. Yet they had strict a moral code surrounding protecting a guest in their home. Did fire teach them that?

Not to get too far off topic, but we know from archaeology that Caesar's description of the 1st century Germans in regard to lacking much agriculture and other trappings of higher culture was greatly exaggerated. Caesar might have been purposely trying to mislead his Roman readers by emphasizing the primitiveness of a new enemy. Or he may have been genuinely unintentionally passing along misinformation, either from the Gauls who wanted to demean a feared enemy, or from the self-perception of the Germans themselves, as they wanted to think of themselves as warriors and hunters rather than farmers, even though agriculture was in fact an important way of life for them. In regard to religion - little or nothing is known about Germanic religion in the Roman period, save from the Romans themselves. While Caesar was probably correct in stating that the early Germans lacked the Druid priestly order of the Celts, there's no reason to assume that the actual deities worshiped were not already Wodan (Odin), Donar or Thunor (Thor), Tiwaz (Tyre), who Tacitus two centuries later identifies as Mercury, Hercules, and Mars, etc. Again, Caesar, for whatever reason, had probably passed along misinformation.

That's true. But he's still an actual source and is quoted for a reason. He crossed the Rhine, fought them, spoke with their leaders, etc. There isn't much else to go on in that period. And it is a fact established via archaeology that German agricultural practices were weak and became much more developed in later centuries. One reason they could sustain the populations required to challenge Rome 500 years later. Did he get the religion entirely wrong? We can speculate.

Agriculture in Germany goes back many thousands of years

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11729813

http://home3.swipnet.se/~w-38391/Ancient%20Germany.html

Well, he doesn't say they do no farming. A greater portion isn't technically all.

The belief is that they then greatly improved their farming skill and land clearances over the next few hundred years and at some point became a richer, more developed society. I just finished reading The Fall of Rome and it covers pollen analysis which shows a big advancement in German agriculture in later years. Which is not to say that Caesar got every detail of the older Germans exactly right, but he was front and center and is generally pretty good with detail.

The wider point is that people generate morality and then teach it with religion, fables, philosophy or just plain tradition. There are lots of ways to do it.

Well thIs depends on what you think of as moral virtue. If you mean the stoning to death of apostates, homosexuals, adulterous women, people who work on the sabbath, those who curse god and a multitude of other sins, then yes you are probably correct, as only a belief in a wrathful god or gods could come up with such institutionalised barbarism.

With regard to the survey I note that at first glance it would appear that a belief in god as the source of morality runs pretty much in step with a belief in creationism. In fact, in many of these countries a belief in evolution could well see you hung or stoned under gods moral guidance.

Most of Caesar's experience was with the Ubii, a Germanic tribe driven from their lands east of the Rhine by the powerful Swabian Germanic confederation, and allowed by the Romans to settle in the Cologne area. By Caesar's own description, the Ubii were wealthy by German standards, living in Celtic hill forts, and practicing a Celtic material culture. Despite what Caesar might have claimed, the Ubii at the time were hardly the exception, as the tribes he had carried hostilities against, such as the Sugambri, Tencteri, and Usipetti, seem to have been indistinguishable from the Ubii. And as Arrantpariah has pointed out, there is in fact ample evidence that the Germans had tilled the soil and raised crops in Caesar's time. But you are quite correct that Germanic culture had in later centuries advanced considerably by the time of the collapse of the western empire.

Just to get even more off topic... Are you referring to the book by Brian Ward-Perkins? ... in spite of the pollen analysis, it seems like it might be a good read.

I've been debating whether or not to make a place for it on my kindle.

On topic, I agree with you. The basic moral impulse is innate. Religion, philosophy, bedtime stories is just a way to standardize and reinforce those morals while knitting a society together.

I mostly agree with that. I just don't think you are looking at the facts the right way round from what Ive read. I recently read a book by Peter Heather that covers this subject a bit.

Those La Tene Germans along the border regions that you referenced were a part of the materially wealthier Celtic-Gallic-Roman world. But that wasn't the German norm. Beyond that culture is a poorer German culture with much less developed ways. The Jastorf culture. A world materially similar to the one Caesar describes. They have poor agricultural practices that could only sustain small bands, relied heavily on their animals, burned out the land after a generation or two and moved on so they didn't even make permanent settlements. Not a wealthy culture. An argument that Heather makes and that Ive seen elsewhere is that much of the Germanic region didn't rate enough Roman interest to aquire it. No money in it. But the states that bordered Rome or a La Tene Gaul were always going to be wealthier due to trade with a wealthier neighbor.

Anyway, Caesar does reference their corn so if he's just saying that the wider German agricultural practices are inferior to Roman practices, he's right. And if he's warning Romans that Germany isn't worth it, he's not alone in that belief. I guess it's a matter of perspective. Is he speaking relatively, just being insulting or both.



The Fall of the Roman Empire. Peter Heather. I really enjoyed it but now I am well done with the subject for awhile.

^^^Thanks, that book looks better and it's cheaper...

I'm pretty sure Locke nicked that idea from Livy. I'm not sure who Livy filched it from....

I am familiar with the Jastorff culture to the east, and archaeology in fact shows that the tribes of this group in fact were not immune to Celtic influence, either.
Some authors I might suggest that represent the alternative view are:
Malcolm Todd, Herbert Schutz, and the author of The Battle that Stopped Rome, and The Barbarians Speak, though I can't recall his name at the moment, just to name a few.

I don't think religion is needed to understand morality on an intellectual level, but explaining why anything's always right or wrong for everyone requires a source outside humanity and nature.

Morality and good values must come from somewhere no matter what anyone thinks of as moral virtue, and I do believe TallyMan is correct:

But then when the tribe on the other side of the river begins to envy and covet or whatever, their own sense of morality in empathy for each other drives the beginning of their neighbors' demise.

Interesting stuff. I'd love to see a breakdown of whether or not the respondent themselves believed in God. And within that, a breakdown of (where applicable) their particular faith/denomination.

As to the GDP correlation (and US non-correlation), my take (to the fairly small extent that I've thought about it) was to go with a common criticism from the Christian right of the welfare state being a significant contribtary factor - that where the state is able to help people, so they come to stop believing in God. That they no longer need to pray for help, nor be in with a church that they can (hopefully) rely on when times are tough.

Could you, uh, explain what that means?

I find the poll question ambiguous, though I am assuming it is meant that 'does one need to believe in God in order to do good things, to behave morally?'. That if one doesn't believe in God, one will not behave morally. Which I very much disagree with.

I don't think we need some guarantor of morality. Besides, one of the oldest arguments I know of - does the guarantor create morality, or do they obey it? - can soon make the guarantor idea unhelpful. Similarly, many an unpleasant thing has been done in the name of some moral guarantor.

I think morality is something inherent to human life. That is, there is a moral dimension to our personal and social behaviour that is inescapable, that we cannot step outside of. But we can certainly (reasonably, sincerely) disagree about what is moral. I think there is mileage in looking into what people (and their societies and cultures) mean by 'moral', and what use they make of it.

^^^
The notion that the welfare state nurtures atheism is not only groundless, but is among the right's most pernicious lies concerning the social safety net. It always seemed to me that the poor were among the most likely to be believers.

The supernatural isn't necessary to believe in or practice morality, but a purely naturalistic philosophy can't explain why morality exists. Without a higher standard, its no more right to feed the poor than it is wrong for the Nazis to have murdered Jews in the Holocaust. Based strictly off our own feelings, we can say we don't like certain things, and explain how they make us feel bad...but inherent morality is not sourced from the natural world. There's no chemical composition for love, and no genetic source for grace or mercy.