Morality

It’s usually expressed by believers, either implicitly or explicitly, that they are moral because either i) they base their lives upon the Bible and its teachings or ii) that God fine-tuned us for morality from the beginning, and it is our job to tap into this divine morality.

Well….what a horrible damnation of humanity! So we can’t be moral without God or the Bible. Isn’t that sort of….you know….belittling our moral actions by saying that we are just channels for God’s morality? So a person who volunteers to go work and help deprived Africans over in Sierra Leone, Burundi etc. at his own financial and time costs is ultimately only doing this because of a divine being? So individually he should not be the one acknowledged for his selfless behaviour, but God. Doesn’t that dull any form of altruism then?

And then what about us atheists? Are we wicked, immoral beings because we reject both the Bible and God? In fact, I’d argue the exact opposite. How many wars have been waged in the name of religion or God? The Inquisitions, the Crusades etc. How many acts of grave immorality have been carried out in the name of religion or God? Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, in expressing the state of suppression of those bringing opposition to the religious rule of the Islamic government and its theocracy, stated that “We will oppress them by God’s order and God’s call to prayer” This man also ordered mass murder of demonstrators and protesters to the theocracy, resulting in thousands upon thousands of deaths. He also in 1989 ordered a fatwa against Salmon Rushdie, for writing the novel The Satanic Verses. That is one example, and I shouldn’t even have to explain in detail religion’s role in the suicide bombings occurring in Iraq, Israel, Indonesia etc. And don’t get me wrong, this is not an Islamic thing. George W. Bush almost invariably invoked the name of God in his horrific foreign policy, including a very much unjustified war at the time in Afghanistan following 9/11. And please don’t get me started on the ‘morality’ of Catholic priests…

So where did morality come from then, if not God? The beauty of it is we don’t really know for sure yet. But the fact that concepts of morality differ from culture to culture should ring alarm bells for those who think that it is a universal applied by God. More than likely morality is a by-product of the evolution of the human brain which is unique in its ability for ‘higher-thinking’ and a ‘theory of other minds’, in other words, empathy. So perhaps it is an evolutionary trait, which has been somewhat refined by situational factors such as the culture we grow up in.

Certainly, even if morality did come from God, then he must have done a pretty incompetent job!