A lot of secularists attack what they see as ‘Christian’ morality. They like to point to things like witch burning and that old favorite the crusades.
The truth is that morality has never been a purely religious affair, nor a purely secular one, and never will be. The bible itself is just a collection of moral fables from a past era; had they have appeared (to the common person) to be unmoral then they would not have been accepted as religious text. The bible did not propose any particularly radical moral upheavals, and it is frankly unimaginable that any of the moral sentiments expressed in either testament could have been completely new. So called ‘religious’ morals really came out of ordinary thinking: the bible is a set of fables which have been idolized by a certain group of people. But there is no pretending that any but an extreme minority have ever gotten all of their morals from the bible, and even if they had, the morals in the bible (as discussed) are not really greatly at odds with ‘non-religious’ morals. Over time, in every culture, moral fables have evolved into religious texts which were, for a long time an important part of shaping the morality societies. To separate out which morals we now hold are ‘religious’ or ‘non-religious’ would be like trying to decipher which parts of the Nile, as it passes Cairo, came from the White Nile and which came from the Blue.
Where do we get our moral intuition from? From stories, from our upbringing and what we are told as children, perhaps also from some inbuilt genetic traits. The moral stories portrayed in most children’s cartoons often have similar morals to biblical passages.
What is considered ‘moral’ has never been dictated purely by religion. It has always arisen out of a complex cultural dialogue which continues. Most religious people bring their own morality to their faith and assess critically the codes and practices of their religion, and this has always been the case. The bible, and pretty much all other religious texts, contain a lot of vague and conflicting advice and it is up to people to judge how this is to be interpreted. Where bad decisions have been made in the name of religion, this is the people’s morality that’s gone wrong, not religion’s (equally, religion can not be accredited with every good deed committed in it’s name).
The Dawkinesque distinction: religious ethics bad, secular ethics better is little more than nonsense. No moral decision can be traced so easily or simplistically back to one or the other root. The evangelical Christian approach: secular ethics bad, religious ethics good is equally guilty of over simplification.
Why? You said yourself, most people carry fundamentally secular morals into their religion anyway. Also, I think it may be important to compare motives. Religious morality is generally observed in order to please ‘God’ and/or secure a place in everlasting paradise, whereas secular morality is observed for no other reason than to help people and ease suffering. There are exceptions, of course, but I think said ‘religious motives’ are a source of much misguided bigotry and persecution.
Excellent post Bevel Monkey. Perhaps what’s dangerous about religious morality is that it often claims to come from a higher power, and thus believers may consider the morality to be beyond question. Anything considered beyond question, religious or otherwise, is a project probably headed for problems.
Currently, research shows morality results from automatic
cognitive processes that are usually
affectively valenced. Moral thinking is for social doing.
Much of human cognition was shaped by natural selection
for life in intensely social groups. Human cognition is
socially situated and socially functional, and a great deal
of that functionality can be captured by viewing people as
intuitive politicians and prosecutors, not as intuitive scientists.
Morality binds and builds. Groups may not be significant units
of selection for the great majority of other
species, but once human beings developed the capacity for
cumulative cultural learning, they invented many ways to
solve the free - rider problem, to build cohesion into their groups,
and increase the importance of group - level
selection pressures relative to individual - level pressures.
These way are what we refer to as morality.
These developments in the understanding of morality in
evolutionary psychology and related
fields are summarized by Jonathan Haidt here: people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/
If the two run into each other and often amount to the same thing, how can one be ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’?
No, I don’t think so. Personally, I think that most people, religious or non-religious, do things because they think it is the right thing to do. Doing something good generally gives us a sense of satisfaction. This subversive view of religious people, that every time they do something good they are just doing it to get in to heaven, is ridiculous. For a start, most religions believe that faith alone will get them in to heaven: there is no points system where they have to do a certain amount of good things to get past the pearly gates. At any rate, human motivation is rarely attributable to such one-dimensional maxims. The idea that every time a Muslim helps someone cross the street, they are thinking ‘I will do this because it will make God happier’ is, lets face it, pretty implausible.
Certain secularist moralities, such as Nazism and Maoism, have similarly dangerous senses of absolutism and authority. Claiming your ethics comes from a ‘higher power’ is just one form of attempting to put your morality beyond questioning. Appealing to a scientific basis, such as social Darwinism, is yet another method, and whilst we could quibble about the philosophical differences between the approaches, the disastrous consequences are similar. I do agree with you, though, that anything put ‘beyond question’ is, as you say, ‘probably headed for problems’. Religious people can learn from this the need to bring their own intuition to their understanding of their religion’s morality (well, actually what they should really learn is that they will do this anyway, whether consciously or unconsciously).
You’re saying that the moral values you have learned have not, at any stage in history before they were taught to you, been influenced by or mixed up in religious thinking?
Great thread brevel_monkey … and great post and link Felix.
I’m impressed with this statement by Haiti :
“Morality, by its very nature, makes it hard to study morality. It binds people together into teams that seek victory, not truth. It closes hearts and minds to opponents even as it makes cooperation and decency possible within groups.”
Morality “binds people together into teams that seek victory.” It’s the way of the survival battle between the species.
I’m a fan of Thoreau. Did you know that during his lifetime (1800s) there was only a billion people on planet earth?
Population of only 1 million in 10,000BCE.That’s less than most of our cities today.
Grouping into teams/tribes worked well back then. Competition of tribes helped maintained the balance of the human population, much like the competition of the food supply between the critters controls their population.
I think we can safely conclude that forming tribes is embedded in human nature (yer now teed up St. James). When human population is small, with ample space, for territorial boundaries, forming tribes is a good survival practice.
But forming tribes with a crowded 7 billion on the earth now threatens our survival.
Isn’t it because of secular morality that religious morality can’t burn me at the stake these days? Thank God, cuz otherwise my tootsies would be toasted by now.
Well, I didn’t say anything about “good” and “bad”. Those were your words. I do, however, think one is far more practical and prudent than the other.
I think you misunderstood. I’m not saying anyone acts morally just because they want to get into Heaven. I’m talking about religious motives. The Bible, for instance, doesn’t say “do good things because it’s right”. The Bible promotes morality to please ‘God’ foremost. That any portion of a person’s motivation to act morally comes from an appeal to a deity is absurd to me.
Also, do you really think many Christians choose to believe a serial killer or rapist goes to Heaven simply because he develops faith at some point in his life? Many do believe ‘God’ keeps score, so to speak. And many probably do consider ‘God’ in nearly every presumably moral decision they make.
I wouldn’t think so. The practice was stopped while most people/governments were still religious. Also secular authorities have used burning as capital punishment. The underlying point is a good one, however. Religious morality need not be moral.
Barbarism is caused by superstition?
I can thinks of lots of other reasons for it. Greed, ambition, envy, etc can all result in terrible crimes.
What about scientifically based cleansing?
That’s true, but even more true is a secular morality doesn’t prevent people from being cruel, from treating others as means to an end, etc. In fact I see little evidence that religion is the cause of cruelty and killing rather than the part of the justification when it is present. Other justifications seem to be there when religion is not.