Religious apologisers, especially the well-educated ones, say that religion (esp. Christianity) has been the driver for all the great civil rights movements from gender equality to the abolition of slavery.
You know what, fine, I'll give you that. It still doesn't make religion a good thing.
It is like saying as the Nazi's medical experiments (reducto ad hitlerum) allowed such great advances in medicine we should allow concentration camps.
The fact that you can cherry pick quotes from any of the religious texts that support an abolition of slavery in no way counterbalances the fact that there are passages that specifically allow nay, command, slavery. Oh wait, those ones are allegory. How silly of me, I'm glad no religious person would ever be confused between the allegorical stories and the ones you should take seriously.
Karen Armstrong, in her new book, states “Jews, Christians, and Muslims all knew that revealed truth was symbolic, that scripture could not be interpreted literally, and that sacred texts had multiple meanings, and could lead to entirely fresh insights,” great, please go tell the people in America who want to abolish the teaching of evolution. Go tell the people in the Middle East who are stoning adulterers and homosexuals to death. Go to Mecca and say that their book should not be interpreted literally. Once you have done that then you can come and discuss with me the deeper meanings that can be taken from these great works.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Sunday, 13 September 2009
Friday, 26 June 2009
Free Will In Religion
The concept of free will is one that often disappears into a semantic debate on the meaning of various terms used rather than the idea that most people understand by the term. This is especially true of atheists.
Religious people do not have this problem at all. They understand that we are all individuals and God has given us the right to choose in any given circumstance, regardless of nature, nurture or situation and only God knows for sure what your choice will be.
The reason there is a difference is probably down to two things:
Religious people are usually more than happy to judge, blame and punish people for their actions as they 'know' it was done through choice.
Atheists want to believe they have free will but do not want to say anything that suggests a supernatural entity or explanation for the freedom from the laws of physics that they seek.
Actually, religious people should pick athiests up on this point in debates!
There are actually only 3 possible ways will in the universe works:
- We obey classical physics and so with enough information every aspect of our lives can be predicted accurately before we are even born until the point of death. Free will is a myth.
- We obey a mix of quantum and classical physics so even though we do not know exactly what will happen to us we know probabilistically what will happen to us and what we will do at every point in our lives. Free will is statistically predictable.
- We have an ability that transcends the laws of physics and so, by definition, free will is supernatural.
One of these three must be the case. A good atheist has to select 1 or 2 but the religious happily choose number 3.
The problem for most atheists, other than their wish to have free will, is what the impact of no free will means for society. How do you blame someone for committing a crime if you realise they had no choice. How can you justify punishing them? It plays along the lines of: without god all things are permitted.
This is absolute nonsense. When you have a puppy and it makes a mess on the carpet, it had no choice, no view on the moral rightness of its actions, yet you punish it anyway to stop it doing it again. The same s true of humans. Punishment and rewards are how we are pushed into acting.
Once we (society) decide an act is undesirable we make a punishment for it. Punishing an act has three fundamental parts:
- Punishment as justice
- Punishment as deterrent
- Punishment as a solution
The punishment as justice argument is redundant as we have no free will.
However by making an act punishable we make it less likely to happen, the pleasure of the act (in some people or some situations) being outweighed by the fear/likelihood of punishment.
When it does happen we stop the perpetrator from being able to recommit the act by locking them up or removing certain rights from the person, e.g. a person who is cruel to animals can no longer keep animals.
It does not mean that we remove mitigating circumstances though, or diminished responsibility. Those are still valid once free will is removed.
From this we can see that the justice system will tick along nicely after we have removed the concept of free will.
Wednesday, 8 April 2009
Morality Exposed
In many "Does God Exist?" debates the question of moral authority comes up. The religious camp claim that without God all morality is subjective and so anything goes. The atheists often say morality is innate. See Hitchens debate here, along with comments.
I side with the religious people here. Morality is subjective. How do I justify this? Well, every act people today consider immoral was at one time deemed praiseworthy or commonplace. Thus we can say that morality changes over time and location. Some religions wear a cheesecloth across their faces when they travel lest they swallow a fly as they consider all life to be sacred. Some people think that killing animals in a kosher or halal way is just and some people find that cruel. And some people hunt animals for sport. These are all activities humans engage in today and consider moral if they live there and immoral if they don't.
So if we can accept that morality is subjective and run with that then where do we end up? Well, we get to the religious argument that without objective morality who are we to say what is right and wrong? Where does morality come from in that case? Let me address that very question.
Humans are a result of evolution by natural selection (even if you don't believe that please try to follow this reasoning) so we must have a certain morality (as we see it) built into us as a way for the species to survive, e.g. even dogs have a sense of fairness that surely must come from them being social animals rather than God. I would imagine that primates have much more complex structures built into their genes and/or brains to enable the species to thrive and as top species in the intelligence league we must be even more developed in many inbuilt social fairness aspects. So we tend to have some sense of justice built in by nature but that changes depending on species, lions kill the young when they take over a pride to ensure the dominance of their genes, humans would never(ish) do such a thing.
Children are then influenced by their parents. They take the morality they were born with and add to it as their parents tell them right from wrong. This is not a moral right/wrong though, this is a survival process. babies that ignore their parents warnings that the green berries are bad will not survive long enough to keep that attitude in the gene pool.
As children age they are then influenced by their peer group. Groups of youths tend to have similar morals. They want to fit in and find it hard to be different, again a survival skill as loners tended to do badly in the mating stakes in pre-history.
Young adults are then hit by the laws, and morals, of society at large. This is what makes countries across the globe so different. There is a personal punishment for breaking these codes of conduct rather than an evolutionary one so the idea of breaking with society tends to be more prevalent. It also allows people to challenge the societies' laws without incurring a reproductive disadvantage.
Once all these moulders of right and wrong have been laid on a person, only then can they apply their intellect to decide on things. If the previous morality has been ingrained deeply then the intellect is not enough to break with that. If they are able to challenge their own morality from a reasonable point of view then they can have an adult view of right and wrong.
Intellect, and the application of it, is what makes society change. We see the action and try to work out if it should be punished, rewarded or ignored based on the results it produces. Hence we see the results of slavery through an empathy with the slave (or a fear of being one) and decide it is wrong. We see two gay people and think "where is the harm?" or think "what if gays were in the majority and decided heterosexuality was illegal?" and give gay couples equal rights.
Society has moved forward, morally, due to people applying their intellect in spite of religion, not because of it. While all of the causes of morality are valid, it is only the intellect that truly makes it right, otherwise we are simple animals. So, subjective as it is, we strive to make it better each generation and move further away from the major religions' versions of morality with each step.
EDIT: To be fair this was my first stab at morality and was a reaction to the certitude of religious people and the smugness that only they have access to a higher morality. Having moved on with my thoughts, it seems that this was a basic stab at personal utilitarianism, but comes across as less subjective than intended. It now seems to me that morality is a personal thing, a collection of principles, values and preferences that were attained as above, but variable over time and weighted differently depending on hunger, tiredness, colour of the room, magnetic fields etc. It is so variable within even a single person over short periods of time that the idea of it being objective is laughable. The argument in favour of utilitarianism requires that it knows our desires better than we know ourselves (possible) but also that it knows our future reactions to having certain preferences met and others not, along with the preferences of those not yet in existence. The idea that we should sacrifice in the here and now for creatures that don't exist is a little too close to religion for me. Utilitarianism fails on many levels, even if we ignore the practical problems of working out what would actually make people happiest and not what they want. There is value in a coarse utilitarianism when it comes to public policy, but it would be better in my opinion if it were to improve the minimum levels of happiness more than increasing the maximum - but that's a subjective opinion because it appeals to one or other of my values...
I side with the religious people here. Morality is subjective. How do I justify this? Well, every act people today consider immoral was at one time deemed praiseworthy or commonplace. Thus we can say that morality changes over time and location. Some religions wear a cheesecloth across their faces when they travel lest they swallow a fly as they consider all life to be sacred. Some people think that killing animals in a kosher or halal way is just and some people find that cruel. And some people hunt animals for sport. These are all activities humans engage in today and consider moral if they live there and immoral if they don't.
So if we can accept that morality is subjective and run with that then where do we end up? Well, we get to the religious argument that without objective morality who are we to say what is right and wrong? Where does morality come from in that case? Let me address that very question.
Humans are a result of evolution by natural selection (even if you don't believe that please try to follow this reasoning) so we must have a certain morality (as we see it) built into us as a way for the species to survive, e.g. even dogs have a sense of fairness that surely must come from them being social animals rather than God. I would imagine that primates have much more complex structures built into their genes and/or brains to enable the species to thrive and as top species in the intelligence league we must be even more developed in many inbuilt social fairness aspects. So we tend to have some sense of justice built in by nature but that changes depending on species, lions kill the young when they take over a pride to ensure the dominance of their genes, humans would never(ish) do such a thing.
Children are then influenced by their parents. They take the morality they were born with and add to it as their parents tell them right from wrong. This is not a moral right/wrong though, this is a survival process. babies that ignore their parents warnings that the green berries are bad will not survive long enough to keep that attitude in the gene pool.
As children age they are then influenced by their peer group. Groups of youths tend to have similar morals. They want to fit in and find it hard to be different, again a survival skill as loners tended to do badly in the mating stakes in pre-history.
Young adults are then hit by the laws, and morals, of society at large. This is what makes countries across the globe so different. There is a personal punishment for breaking these codes of conduct rather than an evolutionary one so the idea of breaking with society tends to be more prevalent. It also allows people to challenge the societies' laws without incurring a reproductive disadvantage.
Once all these moulders of right and wrong have been laid on a person, only then can they apply their intellect to decide on things. If the previous morality has been ingrained deeply then the intellect is not enough to break with that. If they are able to challenge their own morality from a reasonable point of view then they can have an adult view of right and wrong.
Intellect, and the application of it, is what makes society change. We see the action and try to work out if it should be punished, rewarded or ignored based on the results it produces. Hence we see the results of slavery through an empathy with the slave (or a fear of being one) and decide it is wrong. We see two gay people and think "where is the harm?" or think "what if gays were in the majority and decided heterosexuality was illegal?" and give gay couples equal rights.
Society has moved forward, morally, due to people applying their intellect in spite of religion, not because of it. While all of the causes of morality are valid, it is only the intellect that truly makes it right, otherwise we are simple animals. So, subjective as it is, we strive to make it better each generation and move further away from the major religions' versions of morality with each step.
EDIT: To be fair this was my first stab at morality and was a reaction to the certitude of religious people and the smugness that only they have access to a higher morality. Having moved on with my thoughts, it seems that this was a basic stab at personal utilitarianism, but comes across as less subjective than intended. It now seems to me that morality is a personal thing, a collection of principles, values and preferences that were attained as above, but variable over time and weighted differently depending on hunger, tiredness, colour of the room, magnetic fields etc. It is so variable within even a single person over short periods of time that the idea of it being objective is laughable. The argument in favour of utilitarianism requires that it knows our desires better than we know ourselves (possible) but also that it knows our future reactions to having certain preferences met and others not, along with the preferences of those not yet in existence. The idea that we should sacrifice in the here and now for creatures that don't exist is a little too close to religion for me. Utilitarianism fails on many levels, even if we ignore the practical problems of working out what would actually make people happiest and not what they want. There is value in a coarse utilitarianism when it comes to public policy, but it would be better in my opinion if it were to improve the minimum levels of happiness more than increasing the maximum - but that's a subjective opinion because it appeals to one or other of my values...
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