Faith and Morality

I myself was raised a Catholic, and in my high school moral theology classes, I was told that all atheists were evil. You could be a decent atheist but not a good one. As if it were possible to be both evil and decent! Any believer on the other hand, so long as he sincerely and faithfully carried out the dictates of his faith and conscience could be a good person—regardless of what that faith was and what it demanded. So while a Mayan priest could not be a decent person—on account of all that human sacrifice—he might still be good. Even in the heights of my orthodoxy I could not agree with such a statement; how can a good God say an atheist who worked all his life to alleviate poverty was still less worthy of Heaven that some pagan who thought that human blood could make the harvest better?

Most theists, I think, are not of this opinion. Rather many believe that faith tends to develop a good moral code which man might otherwise have difficulty finding on his own. Consider however that a Muslim fundamentalist may think a Christian woman filthy for showing too much skin, while considering himself a saint for taking up a Jihad of the sword, and all the while a Buddhist thinks them both equally murderers because one eats meat and the other, well the other kills people. If they can’t all be right, then religion or faith in and of itself is not an adequate—or even beneficial—guide to morality. This proves doubly true when you consider that strict adherents of Christianity value ‘modesty’ almost as much as the Muslims. Morality must have another, probably external source, or else there is a faith out there with the complete and correct moral code, and all the other ones are (partial) falsehoods.

In point of fact the moral code under which most modern societies work was developed largely by secular forces—against the entrenched resistance of religion. It was religious tradition going back all the way to the Old Testament that legitimized anointed kings that had to be toppled by the secular revolutions. The Old Testament also permitted the Jews to hold slaves and not once did Christian tradition speak out against the practice, rather it was the less religiously conservative North that had to do battle with the traditionally conservative South to set the blacks free in the USA, whereas in Europe, secular forces had already done so. Sexism is also entrenched in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, and only in the previous century, as society became more and more secular, did it become possible for women to begin the task of their own emancipation. We can even see the struggle today with the conservatives legislating against homosexuality while so much of the secular world pleads for equality. Virtually every moral paradigm shift of the past had to battle against faiths that desperately held to the status quo; only long after the revolutions do institutionalized religions adopt the changes and pretend that they were always an aspect of their tradition.

For this reason Muslims in westernized nations insist that Islam is peace and Allah is love, while in societies in which traditional Islam has remained the dominant political force such values do not see the light of day. Here’s a quote from the Qur’an that may give you some indication as to which opinion of Allah most resembles The Prophet’s own view:

4:89 They long that ye should disbelieve even as they disbelieve, that ye may be upon a level (with them). So choose not friends from them till they forsake their homes in the way of Allah; if they turn back (to enmity) then take them and kill them wherever ye find them, and choose no friend nor helper from among them…

If you have read much of the Bible, both the New and the Old Testament, you can find quotes just as terrible. Violence, intolerance, sexism, all the worst aspects of human nature are endemic to every religion—quite often at the expense of our most admirable features—because man made religion and all of his Gods.

I know from personal experience how effective religious inculcation can be, so I cannot deny that it plays a part in man’s moral world. It’s true that belief is not always lived, although often it is, and when it isn’t, guilt and shame accompanies the sinner. You can decide for yourself how wonderful that is. But what I find curious is that the aspects of religion that are most energetically inculcated are not those aspects that deal with human decency. Love of man, or “Christian charity”, gets a passing mention while the evils of sex are hammered in from puberty onwards. It’s the same in almost every religion, the aspects of religious morality that are peculiar to each faith are given the most attention, while those that have become common to all cultures—avoiding harm to others, aid to the poor, etc—take a back seat. Curiously those very ideas which are most valuable in religion, the precursors of humanism, are given much more emphasis by those that profess secular values than those that strongly adhere to any one particular faith. But the young faithful being subjected to religious inculcation are not in a position to recognize this incongruity. They are not in a position to choose what values and ideas get drummed into them. They are just as receptive to intolerance and violence as they are to love and understanding. Really, you can inculcate almost anything into a child, and he will carry some bit of it forever except if he overthrows it by some effort of will. So if we are going to value religion because it sinks itself so well into the minds of the young, we ought to recognize that we can also fear it for that very reason. We should also recognize that humanistic values—the belief in human dignity, for example—can be inculcated just as easily, without recourse to faith and religion.

It can be argued that once a sensible morality has been adopted, religion via love of God and heaven, and the fear of hell can reinforce that morality and encourage man to live by it. After all, it’s done such a great job so far, right? What I don’t understand is why an abstract fear and an abstract love should be thought more effective then what is here and now. If there really are people who only do good because they love God, why can’t they be taught to love man? If there are people who only avoid sin out of fear of Hell and desire for Heaven, why can’t they work with the real punishments and rewards offered by the material world? There have always been good people and there have always been bad people; that is true among atheists and among the faithful, but religion tends to foster certain kinds of evils that are just absent in the secular world, the other kinds of evil (theft, murder, rape, etc.) have been aspects of human nature from the beginning. Considering the decidedly limited effect religion has had on them so far there is no particular reason to think that the incidence of them should drastically increase if faith were to magically disappear. On the other hand, considering how religion so famously holds back progress, a secular world has more chance of decreasing the incidences of poverty, which almost certainly will diminish the occurrences of such crimes.

What ever necessity religion filled in man’s moral world in the past, it has done much more harm then good. If ever we needed it, that time has past and we now can very well be rid of it.