What difference does religion make to morality?
Sexual morality seems to be the most obvious area in which religious believers differ from nonreligious people. When I was young, Christian groups had a lot of leaders had presentations defending traditional Christian views on sex. But they seemed to spend a lot of time arguing that saving sex for marriage was good for you in the long run, so it wasn't presented as something you just do just because God says so. I remember Josh McDowell doing a presentation at ASU entitled Maximum Sex, the idea being that sex within marriage is "maximum" because it fits best with the way God designed us.
On the other hand, traditionally people appealed to religious beliefs to justify our belief that everyone should be treated equally. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are CREATED equal, and were endowed by the CREATOR with certain inalienable rights. But what if we weren't created? Do we still have inalienable rights?
5 comments:
Victor,
Have you been getting advice from ad agencies?
You led with sex to get people's attention and then switched it up to inalienable rights. You're gonna have to practice greater subtlety :-)
Wadaya mean? I figure I have an inalienable right to sex!
""We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are CREATED equal, and were endowed by the CREATOR with certain inalienable rights. But what if we weren't created? Do we still have inalienable rights?"
Human rights are an individual sensibility, not a real existent abstract object floating around in the aether.
So yes, since the universe created me I have universal inalienable rights, at least in my personal sensibility. I also have personal sensibilities such as a personal sense of ought, should, and responsibility.
It turns out that since the human physiology that gives rise to these personal sensibilities is mostly similar for most of our population, then by consensus most of us tend to agree on some common baseline of shared moral sensibilities.
That commonality of individual sensibilities leads to the illusion of absolute morality. Once a person mistakenly confuses shared individual sensibilities due to shared physiology, with absolute morality then the individual so mistaken speculates a source for these imagined absolute moral truths, namely, of course, an imagined almighty being or beings, god or gods.
Hal: How would you defend the intrinsic worth of persons against a skeptic about such claims? Many people in the history of the world would have denied such a claim outright. Dalits in India are not treated by their culture as if they have intrinsic worth. Even though Christians have struggled with the idea of slavery, I believe that one of the reasons we got rid of it (well, at least the obvious sort on plantations) was because there is a cognitive dissonance created between the belief that we can kidnap, enslave, and discriminate against black people (since they are inferior and "natural slaves") and the belief that God created, and Christ died for every individual person, intending them to be joint heirs with Him in heaven.
If, instead, you think we were just spat up by evolution, if it is just survival of the fittest in a dog eat dog world, what argument do you have against someone who wants to take advantage of their superior position to exploit others? Perhaps someone thinks, like Nietzsche, that Christianity has produced a "slave morality" that favors the weak over the strong and therefore suppresses greatness. How do you answer this kind of skepticism about the idea that all people have intrinsic dignity and worth?
Further, Jefferson's deism involved skepticism about miraculous claims on Christianity, but it was a distinctly Christian deism, including a belief in future rewards and punishments. It is NOT to be confused with the belief that God winds up the world and leaves it alone.
https://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2015/10/what-is-deism-not-you-think.html
Victor,
"If, instead, you think we were just spat up by evolution, if it is just survival of the fittest in a dog eat dog world, what argument do you have against someone who wants to take advantage of their superior position to exploit others?"
Clearly that is the world we live in. Just read the news, read history.
I often hear from Christians things along the lines of "if there is no god then everybody can just do whatever they want". Yes, of course, and that is just what everybody does in fact do, what they want, the aggregate of each individual's wants. It's the only thing any of us can do. If you do X then X must have been what you wanted in the aggregate. If you did not want to do X overall as the highest summation of your wants then you would not have done X.
A world of military, economic, and personal domination of the weak by the strong is just what we would expect in a world absent a good god, and that is just what we see all around us.
Human rights are a personal sensibility that is shared by the many. So, being the social animals that we are, the many agree by convention to assert these sensibilities as laws binding on all citizens. Those who violate the shared sensibilities of the majority in an egregious enough way are forcibly separated from society by consensus.
Those are just the mechanisms employed by social animals for the self protection of the majority.
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