An interesting quote I found from Arthur C Clarke

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"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion."

Top Ten Arthur C Clarke Quotes

QFT. I see red every time some theist claims that atheists can't be moral. IMO if the only thing keeping you from acting like a jerk is fear of eternal damnation you aren't a moral person. for an act to be truly ethical it must both have a good result and the person doing the act must have altruistic intentions. If you are being a "good" person out of fear of eternal damnation you are not acting based on altruism, but are acting on one's self-interest (fear of punishment).

I don't know about all religions, but Christianity has as its basic tenet that all humans are evil and only Christianity has the cure. It's snake oil theology and it seems to work with many people.

As a generalisation I've found that devoutly religious people (of whatever religion) are the most intolerant, small minded, petty, vindictive and least moral people I've ever met.

They often portray an image of better than thou, or of being kind to the poor and the needy and of high moral standing, but scratch the surface and many of them speak with such hatred for people who don't conform or share the tenets of their faith - e.g. homosexuals will be burned in hell etc.

Morality does not need religion. Humans have an innate sense of morality most simply put as "treat others as you would want to be treated yourself" - this sense of empathy forms a better base for morality that some dried up words in a so called religious text.

Although I believe that religion is not necessary for morality it is probably unwise to generalize as to where and how morality arises and under what circumstances. Classical psychological experiments have indicated that normal people can easily be made to act very immorally. My own experience is that most people seem to act morally but sometimes masses of people do not behave well.

"Good people will do good things, evil people will do evil things, but for good people to do evil things THAT takes religion"

--Steven Weinberg (US physicist)

Yes, it is interesting that during a wartime mentality organised atrocities are more acceptable, from raping and torturing people to throwing them into gas chambers for mass extermination. I think this may come about at least partly due to propaganda that a certain group (religious, sexual-orientation, racial or otherwise) is the enemy and the cause of suffering and problems in society. That society then mobilises against the perceived "enemy".

Not ALL Christianity.

[quoteAuthor Message
TallyMan Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 7:25 am Post subject:

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Sand wrote:
Although I believe that religion is not necessary for morality it is probably unwise to generalize as to where and how morality arises and under what circumstances. Classical psychological experiments have indicated that normal people can easily be made to act very immorally. My own experience is that most people seem to act morally but sometimes masses of people do not behave well.


Yes, it is interesting that during a wartime mentality organised atrocities are more acceptable, from raping and torturing people to throwing them into gas chambers for mass extermination. I think this may come about at least partly due to propaganda that a certain group (religious, sexual-orientation, racial or otherwise) is the enemy and the cause of suffering and problems in society. That society then mobilises against the perceived "enemy".

]

This is a psychic defence mechanism. It is very hard to harm something for which you have empathy. By way of example, I hunt, and it doesn't "hurt" that much to kill an animal for me; however, I could never be a rancher because the jump from caregiver to butcher is just too personaly painful.

Regards,

I ate meat most of my life until I saw a brief film clip of a cow in a slaughterhouse trying to flee its executioner on two broken legs. I have not eaten meat since. I wonder if that is morality.

If that is morality then why do people care about it? If morality is merely a psychological aversion to certain actions then why do atheists care if they actually have it? If morality is merely a psychological aversion, then how can any religion claim to have a power over it?

Frankly, I think that the issue is not psychology but rather philosophical. Theists usually deny the ability of a reductionist/naturalistic methodology to allow for real moral values to exist. They would claim that under a reductionist/naturalistic methodology for understanding the world, moral values would simply reduce away to psychological preferences as can be seen in Sand's example, and if morality is only a psychological preference then it is not more or less special than any other preference and thus on some level loses its reality, sort of like how a 100 dollar bill loses its potency once it is revealed to be a fake. To the Christian, the death of metaphysics under atheism is the same as showing the dollar bill to be fake, you can say you have it, but it isn't a dollar bill.


How do we prove better? To say "better" from any objective standpoint means that we must have some objective measure. This to me seems to recurse back to the morality, demanding some form of meta-morality to prove morality, which is ridiculous. You can say that you like it better, but to say that it is better is just nonsense.


Christians would agree with the first part. The 2 commandments post Christ were loving God and man (Mark 12:28-31) and frankly, that cannot be done out of fear. Frankly tough, the terms "jerk" and "altruistic" are not even morally important anyway, only so if an individual says that they are. I mean, ethical egoists exist and ethical egoism is a valid moral philosophy, which does not seek to avoid jerkishness or seek to be altruistic. I can understand that this proclamation by Christians on the immorality of atheists can make you angry, especially given that a number of Christians really are smart enough to believe that what could otherwise be a reasonable philosophical argument(a non-error theory meta-ethical belief is built upon non-reductionist assumptions about metaphysics to say things in a manner that may have confused me) into an issue of atheists being sociopaths.

Experimental psychologists and Darwinian evolutionists have determined that there is real survival value in altruism. Religion captures much of this biological motivation for its own, frequently applying it to perverted and scoundrelist ends. There is no doubt that many people work through religion for generous and altruistic ends but the base question remains. Does religion benefit from the innate and general motivations of the bulk of people or do the bulk of people benefit from some of the altruistic declarations of religion? Or is there merely a mix of the two?

Or patriotism. Surrendering one's good sense to a group (i.e. the leader) is a sure path to self-destruction.