Among the many annoying consequences of religion, the misunderstandings concerning morality that it fosters are among the most displeasing. Religion, more than any other force, has essentially stunted the moral growth of humanity for centuries, firmly entrenching the most childish of ethical understandings in unchangeable dogma. The Old Testament, for instance, is nothing but a long litany of divine threats, promising reward for those who obey and destruction for those who turn from God. This text, far from inspiring any deep ethical understanding, instead teaches that man must be good out of fear of consequences, and that “goodness” is whatever God commands, whether it be murdering whole cities or sacrificing your first-born child. Thankfully, throughout history a great many people have had the good sense to ignore most of the “moral teachings” of the Bible and have instead spuriously used the text to promote progressive values ranging from civil rights for African Americans to criticism of unjust wars. But these same values had long before been espoused by secularists.

One of the main criticisms of secular ethics, naturally, is that it is supposedly relative and not founded upon anything objective. But it is no more relative than religious morality, and indeed moral systems that derive from God can be criticized in a similar manner. For instance, if God merely commands a particular behavior because it is good, then God’s role is superfluous; God is not the origin of morality in this case and it transcends even him, for he is only describing it as it is rather than inventing it himself. But if whatever God commands is good simply by virtue of his commanding it, then morality is basically relative. God could command anything, even mutually exclusive behaviors or reprehensible acts like murder and rape, and they would therefore be “good”. In fact, this is exactly what you find in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. In a way, this trivializes morality by redefining “good” to “whatever God does or wants”. God becomes “morally perfect” only by definition, because we’ve defined goodness in terms of his own actions and desires. Of course, the theologian can argue that God never commands rape or murder and therefore his goodness also accords with our own sense of goodness, but it does not avoid the problem of trivializing what it means to be good, and because God is capable of doing anything one would have to admit that IF God did something like murder or rape, one would have to call this “good” under this system of morality.

The greatest problem with divine-command morality is that it is ultimately more relativistic than secular ethics in practice. Because religious morality is hoisted upon some unknowable entity and denies any contribution empirical knowledge of reality could give us, it creates an unthinking dogmatism and knee-jerk acceptance of whatever interpretation of a holy book an individual finds satisfying. The supposedly “objective” morality of Christianity has given rise to pro-choice and pro-life voices, to those who support and oppose homosexuality, and to such a diversity of scripture splicing and interpretation that it is laughable to characterize it as objective. In the end, it serves only as a recipe for justifying one’s own preconceptions, with no need for nuance or a deeper understanding of ethics. This is what happens when you divorce morality from reality and foist it upon some cosmic mystery.

This means that a great many religious people naively assert that morality absolutely requires God’s existence. Some will even claim that if God did not exist, nothing would stop them from going about committing all sorts of crimes. Whenever someone makes such a claim, simply ask him, “So you’d fuck your dog in the ass while ripping out and eating your wife’s eyeballs if God did not exist?” If he denies that he’d do this, it just shows that you don’t need God to prevent you from committing heinous acts. We don’t need to fear divine punishment to recognize that causing rampant carnage wouldn’t necessarily be all that enjoyable. And if he maintains that he would do such a thing, then clearly he needs a psychiatrist and a heavy dosage of sedatives, as well as a new diet that does not consist of his spouse’s eyeballs.

There are plenty of reasons to behave morally, even in the absence of any absolute moral law handed down to us from on high. Our own self-interests are often served through moral behavior, cooperation, and helpfulness. When we share with others, they are likely to share with us in the future. We do good things for our family and friends because it can genuinely make us feel good to do so. There is no need to posit a threatening deity hurling lightning bolts to understand that making your significant other happy is a good thing and that a simple smile is reward in itself. And should we choose to simply disregard the thoughts and feelings of others, raping and pillaging and killing, we’d soon find ourselves either ostracized from society and its benefits or hunted down and killed by those seeking revenge or an end to our destruction. These are pragmatic, consequence-oriented reasons that even a religious person steeped in divine-command morality should be capable of understanding.

Ultimately, of course, there are deeper and more insightful reasons to be moral. Religion often blinds us to these reasons or invents false reasons, as the religious do when invoking without evidence the concept of a “soul” on which to hang morality. As such, religion divorces moral understanding from reality, tying it to some metaphysical realm that can’t truly be understood. Secular ethics, on the other hand, can account for the seeming progression of morality through history, our deepest moral intuitions, and even explain why we behave morally in the first place. It places moral understanding not in some mysterious being, but in humanity, in consciousness, and in our relations to other beings—in short, it makes morality something that can be understood and investigated. For that reason, morality changes, and not necessarily because it is relativistic, but because new facts are accumulated to better illuminate the truth. Descartes, for instance, thought animals to be nothing more than machines, and with that in mind it seems they deserve no moral consideration, but as our knowledge progresses we now know that many animals possess extensive cognitive capacities like self-awareness, emotions, and even rudimentary moral understanding. Therefore, it is not a result of an arbitrary, spurious change of thought that has led to increasing consideration of animal welfare; this is actually a result of a better understanding of animals themselves and their features that are relevant for moral personhood. And though it may not be unchanging like a divine command, that is precisely why it is preferable—because it does not encode as dogma the short-sighted ethics of an outmoded past.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 11:26 PM and is filed under Atheism, Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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