Posts by behemot

2

Morality: no gods required

by behemot in

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/paula_kirby/2009/10/morality_no_gods_required.htmlmorality: no gods required begin blogger thumbs end blogger thumbs q: is there good without god?

can people be good without god?

how can people be good, in the moral and ethical sense, without being grounded in some sort of belief in a being which is greater than they are?

behemot

sorry ... posted in the wrong section!

Behemot

2

Morality: no gods required

by behemot in

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/paula_kirby/2009/10/morality_no_gods_required.htmlmorality: no gods required begin blogger thumbs end blogger thumbs q: is there good without god?

can people be good without god?

how can people be good, in the moral and ethical sense, without being grounded in some sort of belief in a being which is greater than they are?

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/paula_kirby/2009/10/morality_no_gods_required.html

Morality: no gods required

Q: Is there good without God? Can people be good without God? How can people be good, in the moral and ethical sense, without being grounded in some sort of belief in a being which is greater than they are? Where do concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, come from if not from religion? From where do you get your sense of good and evil, right and wrong?

Can people be good if they don't think Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist in the English language? Or if they prefer cats to dogs? Or if they fail to resemble me in any other small detail? Ludicrously smug questions, of course, yet the religious never seem to blush when asking non-believers whether we can be good despite not sharing their peculiar beliefs.

And yet it is an important question for secularists to answer, because it is the myth that religious belief is somehow necessary for morality that is providing the life support for religion in many Western societies, long after we should have been reaching for the embalming fluid.

My sense of right and wrong comes from exactly the same source as yours: parental upbringing, society's norms, an evolved empathy with others.

There has been considerable research into this aspect of human existence, and what is emerging is a pretty clear rule-of-thumb: namely, in any community - of whatever race, social class or religious belief (or none) - 4 out of 5 people will generally obey society's rules and behave in ways considered to be 'moral', and 1 out of 5 won't.

There is an evolutionary explanation for this: we are dependent for our survival and well-being on the people around us. Most of us survive best when we are living harmoniously with others (i.e. not stealing, not killing, not harming them avoidably). Doing otherwise can have negative consequences: loss of life in some societies, loss of freedom in most, loss of respect and good standing in all. And most of us survive best when the people around us respect and like us, for the obvious reason that they are then more likely to help us if we need them to.

However, if someone is sufficiently devious, he may survive best by breaking, rather than obeying, the rules, because he may be less likely to get caught and less likely to have to face the negative consequences of his actions. This is the 1 in 5.

This has been tested in a host of different situations, environments and cultures, and has been found to be universally consistent. It is the same whether people are religious or not: there is no correlation between better behavior and belief in a deity.

Interestingly, the 4 in 5 people who are generally happy to obey society's rules cease being happy to do so if they see the 1 in 5 getting away with it. At that point, they become resentful and, significantly, less inclined to follow the rules themselves. Again, this has been shown to apply to the religious and non-religious alike. This is why most prison sentences carry an element of retribution and are not just intended to protect society from an offender's potentially harmful actions; it is why justice not only has to be done, but seen to be done.

From here it is not difficult to see where ideas about post-death retribution sprang from. 4 out of 5 of us feel the need to see wrong-doers punished for their actions. According to the Jewish biblical scholar Geza Vermes, in the earliest days of Judaism there was no belief in life after death, heaven or hell: they believed the claim in Deuteronomy that the righteous would be rewarded and the wicked punished during their lifetimes. It was only later, when it became patently obvious that this wasn't the case, that some Jews started to think that the promised reward or retribution must come after death. And so the Abrahamic tradition of heaven and hell was born - and was tremendously convenient to those trying to govern the masses, of course, because it declared: 'Don't even think of breaking the law, because even if we don't get you, God will.'

Convenient but superfluous, because all the research shows that atheists as well as believers all conform to the basic 4:1 ratio of moral vs amoral. Belief in divinely imposed rules and post-mortem punishment is not just silly in itself, but quite unnecessary in terms of upholding society's values. (Anyone interested in learning more about the 4:1 ratio will enjoy this lecture from the Cambridge Darwin Festival.)

But there's more. Normal, healthy human beings feel empathy towards others: it has evolved with us and has been shown to be present in a range of other animals too. We have an overwhelming dislike of suffering ourselves, and our imaginations - which developed for other, survival-related purposes - allow us to feel other people's suffering and vicariously suffer with them. So 4 out of 5 of us simply don't want to cause others to suffer. Nothing to do with being made in the image of God, and everything to do with evolution and survival.

Humans have been around in their current form for the best part of 150,000 years. Judaism emerged about 4000 years ago. How could humans ever have managed to survive so long prior to the invention of the Abrahamic god if they needed belief in God to give them a sense of how to live together in their communities? If there wasn't a strong sense of acceptable and unacceptable behavior? The simple fact is that humans are social animals and our chances of survival are greatly enhanced when we abide by certain basic social norms. That is more than enough reason for a basic understanding and acceptance of those norms to be hardwired into us.

We do not need God in order to be moral. In fact, our innate moral instincts tell us that many of the acts and commands attributed to God are themselves morally repugnant. And most immoral of all is the Christian teaching that even a newborn baby is steeped in Original Sin and deserves to burn in hell for all eternity. Any philosophy that teaches us to view our fellow humans as inherently evil, especially if they do not subscribe to our own belief system, is actively dangerous and works against our ability to live together in harmony - and it is our need to do this which underlies all genuinely moral precepts and behaviour.

33

European Court: No Crucifixes in Italian Schools

by behemot in

jw
friends

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/03/world/ap-eu-italy-religious-symbols.html?_r=1.

your opinion?.

behemot

The problem with Italy is that the Vatican considers the country as its courtyard and its feud, heavily interfering into the Italian affairs in ways that would be deemed unthinkable elsewhere and that are unacceptable for a democracy.

With the strong backing of the Right-wing government and its leader (Silvio Berlusconi) the Vatican and its new pope try to impose their ultra-conservative agenda on Italian civil society on issues like the teaching of Catholic religion in public schools, birth control, gay rights and the right to opt for a dignified death, to mention a few.

33

European Court: No Crucifixes in Italian Schools

by behemot in

jw
friends

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/03/world/ap-eu-italy-religious-symbols.html?_r=1.

your opinion?.

behemot

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/03/world/AP-EU-Italy-Religious-Symbols.html?_r=1

Your opinion?

New trends: Kenotic Theology & Evolutionary Christology (for the Daniel Dennett's fans)

by behemot in

jw
friends

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/almost-live-report-daniel-dennett-at-the-cambridge-science-and-faith-bash/.

behemot

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/almost-live-report-daniel-dennett-at-the-cambridge-science-and-faith-bash/

36

This is a perfect religion!

by life is to short in

jw
friends

this is perfect religion with imperfect people.

the elders are imperfect that is why there are problems.

we just need to endure because jehovah is allowing this as a test to see if we will still love him.

behemot

LITS, then how come JWs keep pointing to other religions' shortcomings as evidence that they are not the true religion?

Don't you realize that this type of rationalization can be made for just any other religion? ... just substitute "Jehovah" with "the Lord", "Allah" or whatever other god-name in your post and you have a perfect (?) way of explaining away the problems any religious organization on earth may have.

Behemot

2

Seminarian convicted of homosexual abuse of teen, then ordained in another country

by behemot in

http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=4423.

behemot

AdaMakawee,

I do know the difference.

Maybe the headline of the news item (which I copied as the title of the thread) is a bit misleading in this regard, but I think it's pretty clear that talking about "homosexual abuse of teen" the headline wants to point to the fact that the seminarian abused a male (i.e. his same sex) teen and not a girl.

Behe

6

Words changed when Russell's predictions failed

by Doug Mason in

none of russells predictions came to pass, so they altered offending words in his books and then continued to sell them.. .

i created a file showing about 15 corresponding pages from millennial dawn and studies in the scriptures where key words were amended.

it is available at: http://www.jwstudies.com/changed_md_and_ss_words.pdf .. .

behemot

Interesting stuff ... jet another example of the borg's orwellian, revisionist rewriting of its own material and history ...

behe

1