The World Beyond BetterMost > Anything Goes

The Atheist Thread, Cont'd.

(1/10) > >>

Impish:
For some reason, I can no longer access the thread "Atheists: Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are."  My browser freezes if I try to post in it.

So I'm starting a new one, which I'm treating as a continuation of the first, beginning with a marvelous (and thought-provoking) Op-Ed piece from Sam Harris.

Enjoy.

Impish:


Do We Really Need Bad Reasons To Be Good?
The Boston Globe
By Sam Harris | October 22, 2006

THE MIDTERM elections are fast approaching, and their outcome could well be determined by the "moral values” of conservative Christians. While this possibility is regularly bemoaned by liberals, the link between religion and morality in our public life is almost never questioned. One of the most common justifications one hears for religious faith, from all points on the political spectrum, is that it provides a necessary framework for moral behavior. Most Americans appear to believe that without faith in God, we would have no durable reasons to treat one another well. The political version of this morality claim is that our country was founded on "Judeo-Christian principles,” the implication being that without these principles we would have no way to write just laws.

It is, of course, taboo to criticize a person’s religious beliefs. The problem, however, is that much of what people believe in the name of religion is intrinsically divisive, unreasonable, and incompatible with genuine morality. The truth is that the only rational basis for morality is a concern for the happiness and suffering of other conscious beings. This emphasis on the happiness and suffering of others explains why we don’t have moral obligations toward rocks. It also explains why (generally speaking) people deserve greater moral concern than animals, and why certain animals concern us more than others. If we show more sensitivity to the experience of chimpanzees than to the experience of crickets, we do so because there is a relationship between the size and complexity of a creature’s brain and its experience of the world.

Unfortunately, religion tends to separate questions of morality from the living reality of human and animal suffering. Consequently, religious people often devote immense energy to so-called "moral” questions—such as gay marriage—where no real suffering is at issue, and they will inflict terrible suffering in the service of their religious beliefs.

Consider the suffering of the millions of unfortunate people who happen to live in sub-Saharan Africa. The wars in this part of the world are interminable. AIDS is epidemic there, killing around 3 million people each year. It is almost impossible to exaggerate how bad your luck is if you are born today in a country like Sudan. The question is, how does religion affect this problem?

Many pious Christians go to countries like Sudan to help alleviate human suffering, and such behavior is regularly put forward as a defense of Christianity. But in this case, religion gives people bad reasons for acting morally, where good reasons are actually available. We don’t have to believe that a deity wrote one of our books, or that Jesus was born of a virgin, to be moved to help people in need. In those same desperate places, one finds secular volunteers working with organizations like Doctors Without Borders and helping people for secular reasons. Helping people purely out of concern for their happiness and suffering seems rather more noble than helping them because you think the Creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it.

But the worst problem with religious morality is that it often causes good people to act immorally, even while they attempt to alleviate the suffering of others. In Africa, for instance, certain Christians preach against condom use in villages where AIDS is epidemic, and where the only information about condoms comes from the ministry. They also preach the necessity of believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ in places where religious conflict between Christians and Muslims has led to the deaths of millions. Secular volunteers don’t spread ignorance and death in this way. A person need not be evil to preach against condom use in a village decimated by AIDS; he or she need only believe a specific faith-based moral dogma. In such cases we can see that religion can cause good people to be much less good than they might otherwise be.

We have to realize that we decide what is good in our religious doctrines. We read the Golden Rule, for instance, and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: If a man discovers that his bride is not a virgin on their wedding night, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22: 13-21). If we are civilized, we will reject this as utter lunacy. Doing so requires that we exercise our own moral intuitions, keeping the real issue of human happiness in view. The belief that the Bible is the word of God is of no help to us whatsoever.

As we consider how to run our own society and how to help people in need, the choice before us is simple: Either we can have a 21st-century conversation about morality and human happiness—availing ourselves of all the scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last 2,000 years of human discourse—or we can confine ourselves to an Iron Age conversation as it is preserved in our holy books.

Wherever the issue of “moral values” surfaces in our national conversation in the coming weeks, ask yourself which approach to morality is operating. Are we talking about how to best alleviate human suffering? Or are we talking about the whims of an invisible God?

Sam Harris is the author of Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith. He can be reached through his website, www.samharris.org.

email: [email protected]
web: http://www.samharris.org/

Mikaela:
Thank you for reviving the thread and for posting the Sam harris piece.


--- Quote ---It is, of course, taboo to criticize a person’s religious beliefs. The problem, however, is that much of what people believe in the name of religion is intrinsically divisive, unreasonable, and incompatible with genuine morality.
--- End quote ---

That is just our dilemma, isn't it? Case in point;

I just got a Jehova's Witness promotional  leaflet in the mail box. Normally that kind of thing would go directly in the trash can without no further glance from me, but this time I figured I'd have a look to see how they present themselves to entirely random people. The leaflet deals with "the end of false religion". And since they according to their own leaflet describe their vision of that particular End based on details in the Book of Revelations (as I think it's called, pardon me for being very wobbly on the English titles of the books of the Bible, that's one thing I've never felt the need to spend much time on learning correctly in English) it's going to be a rather grisly end. And these "false religions", then - what are they? Well, according to the leaflet they are any religion that - just like atheists - want to accept same-sex couples being allowed to marry, and accept gay or lesbian preachers, or tolerate common-law marriages, or show tolerance towards religious leaders who abuse children. Just the mix of stuff in that list makes me shudder in disgust. As if sexual abuse of children is in any way comparable with the rest....!?!  >:(

But that aside, I get so sad and yes, angry at seing someone presenting various types of adult relationships that are in fact normal, humane, completely accepted in this country and entirely legal as "immoral, false and wrong",  insisting that those who support people's obvious rights under humane and decent laws will come to a horrible end. Freedom of belief and freedom of speech are good and necessary, and of necessity also entail people being allowed to go on like they do in this leaflet. But I still find it very difficult to read this. While I fully accept anyone freely and without undue pressure making a decision about how they themselves want to live because they think their God tells them to, why do they always need to actively try to impose their intolerant and inhumane views on others, by means of threats and horror stories, if not by more directly violent means? That is what this leaflet does, or tries to do.  I am offended at unsolicited getting such inhumane propaganda in my mailbox.  :-\

Impish:

--- Quote from: Mikaela on October 23, 2006, 10:29:25 am --- While I fully accept anyone freely and without undue pressure making a decision about how they themselves want to live because they think their God tells them to, why do they always need to actively try to impose their intolerant and inhumane views on others, by means of threats and horror stories, if not by more directly violent means?

--- End quote ---

Because they believe that's what god tells them to do.  As Harris points out in his book "The End of Faith," their actions -- even piloting planes into buildings -- are rational if they take their holy book literally.

This is why Harris, Richard Dawkins and many others (including me) view all religious dogma as a major cause of evil.

But even fundamentalists experience atheism when they consider Thor or Zeus.  Once upon a time, societies believed in the reality of these gods, but came to realize they were better understood as Myth.

We can  hope that people of today will come to the same realization.

Mikaela:

--- Quote --- Because they believe that's what god tells them to do.
--- End quote ---

I guess that's one of the main contradiction in terms that I struggle with when trying to understand the concept of religion and to understand people who do truly believe in a God; that they can be so convinced that their God is all-powerful and yet be equally certain that they have to act on his behalf, that he in fact needs them to do so.  ???

I'd sincerely wish they'd leave the action and judgement and missionary work and whatever else to their omnipotent God and not be so eager to do his job for him, especially since they have to base their work on interpretations of millenia-old ambiguous texts. (I know that won't ever happen, of course, long as religion is and remains mainly a tool of power politics and not just a question of spirituality between each person and their conscience.)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page