You don’t need any religion for a “moral compass”, but basic ethical principles.
For the most time religions were (and are still) used as a means of power to either suppress your own population (see most islamic countries today) or divide people and justify wars (see catholics and protestants / orthodox in the past).
Countless people were killed in the name of some “religion”.
Or are all those who spread terror and hatred for religious reasons simply not religious enough. Of course, religion does not necessarily have to degenerate into violence, but it is not at all suitable as a measure of morality, as history shows us.
I don’t know… seems to me like there’s no sin enumerated in Bible that believer would be unable to somehow explain as a pro god action. God’s mercy and 10 commandments are concepts that appear to be paradoxical to each other.
Christians have 10 commandments and can’t follow them, most often even won’t pretend to, because… checks notes … god will forgive them… Imagine the talk with saint Peter after death — ”so what do you have to say for yourself?“ — ”well, I went to church and shit, and God forgives“ — ”in my experience he really responds to arrogance and taunting“.
I love the story of the 10 commandments — so he went up a mountain, sat there for way too long (I guess good clubs up there, after all he comes back later), came down with the tablets (something about killing or not written on it), didn’t like what he saw, smash the priceless religious relic and proceeded to murder everyone. Any true crime podcast would tell you that is destruction of evidence and premeditation, also clearly psychotic tyrannical religious cult leader kind of situation. Appears to me he ”saved“ them from Egypt for his own amusement.
As an aside — Jews have over 600 commandments sourced from the VERY SAME BOOK.
Judaism fascinates me with their rules. From an outsiders perspective, it’s like a constant game of cat and mouse with God trying to find loopholes in their laws.
You forgot the part of the story everyone glosses over; he went back to get another copy of the tablets and the new set have different rules. The new set is the one called “The Ten Commandments” in the story, not the one most people thing of.
I would argue that’s not necessarily the case - see slavery, caste systems, discrimination etc. In many countries currently and throughout history it’s been perfectly legal to treat the “other” as less than oneself, even up to and including murder and torture.
Also, often laws are created to enforce religious doctrine, which while perhaps morally preferable to those of that religion may be abhorrent to those outside it. (Abortion, burkas/hijab, education restrictions, prison sentencing, drug/alcohol legality, etc)
There’s a lot of law protecting immorality/punishing moral actions as well. Look at how difficult it is for people to get justice through the legal system in so many cases. It can take years fighting corporations lawyers before they’re paid damages.
That’s only if the people writing the law have a moral compass of one sort (religious or not).
If I become ruler and write the law so that helping the poor is criminal, the only solution to a person unable to pay their debt is death, and that only people of a certain demographic are allowed to use front doors to establishments I don’t think you’d say that the law is a closer shot to morality than religious doctrine.
In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
I really like the way Jmike put it at 20:40 in this show
In 1 Samuel 15:3, when god commands the Amelekites to be–infants to be slaughtered, that would be “good” under your view. That would be a good thing. So long as it’s commanded by the thing–that’s not morality at all, that’s obedience. There’s nothing there about what someone should or should not do. The moral facts can just change on a whim. I don’t understand this high ground of morality from theists when theirs is so vacuous and devoid of anything intrinsic to the actual actions. It’s actually an extrinsic thing. What makes, like, throwing someone off a building “wrong” is if god puts this extrinsic notion that it’s wrong, this command, not that the intrinsic action had anything to do with it, right? It’s so divorced from how we actually deal with ethics. So I don’t get this move of putting the theist at this high moral ground, I dont get it.
From a religious viewpoint, I believe that many theists would would say that their god is perfect and the standard of morality to which everything is compared. Should something waver from this standard, it is immoral. A theist that believes in an unchanging god might then reason that a non theist, or a thiest that believes in a god that changes or is not eternal in its attributes, is not capable of operating under a seperate moral code because their code would be subject to change as they or their god changes. One is capable of acting morally if their actions fall under the fixed code, but their actions would not be moral because of their own seperate code, but because they coincide with the higher code.
Looking back to the example given from 1 Samuel, a Christian would likely reason that the actions of the Hebrew army were moral because punishment of “evil”, as defined by their god, is a moral action. Things are very rarely black and white. While most would say that killing, for example, is not good, it can be justified and moral should the conditions satisfy the proper conditions.
If absolutely any theist I know tells me that it is okay to murder an innocent child because their parents belong to a region that treated your people badly, and because someone said that God said to, I would cut that monster out of my life faster than I typed this comment.
Again, it isn’t a moral framework to say “whatever God says to do is good.” That’s just obedience. It says nothing about the morality of any given action, and provides us with no framework on which to build our moral code. It’s just saying “that guy said he wants these kids dead, so the right thing to do is kill these kids.” Absolutely hideous.
If absolutely any theist I know tells me that it is okay to murder an innocent child because their parents belong to a region that treated your people badly, and because someone said that God said to,
Obviously the child wouldn’t be innocent in that case /s
I think if we’re going to categorize people as “good” or “evil”, we should distinguish between their thoughts and actions. Otherwise, we’re playing Thought Police.
In other words, I think a good answer to your question is, “Potentially.” or “Quite possibly, but we will never know for sure, because things played out differently.”
It's a really weird argument. I never even thought about murdering anyone, and never needed a sky wizard to tell me so. Imagine thinking about strangling your neighbour every day if it weren't for that pesky bible.
When someone says that a lack of religion leads to a lack of morality, what they're necessarily really saying is that they're so deeply sociopathic that they not only can't reason morally, but can't even envision the possibility of doing so. They're effectively stating outright that they can't even imagine arriving at sound moral judgments through the application of reason, empathy and concern for others, and that the only way they can even conceive of morality is as a set of rules laid down and enforced by some enormous daddy figure who's going to punish them if they break them.
It gets worse, because that’s what people use to justify the argument that people being evil is a part of human nature. Because they genuinely believe that being evil is the default state of humans despite centuries of evidence otherwise.
I always say that the idea of civilised society is something we tell ourselves to make us feel better about the fact that we’re living amongst wild animals.
There are a range of people from altruistic to greedy sociopaths. And few if any are so simple that “good” or “bad” is a sufficient descriptor.
Humans evolved to be cooperative, on average, only to such a degree to enable us to survive. On the surface we can mostly not maim and kill each other enough to work together on things.
But we have many competing motivations and instincts. We aren’t far enough removed from our violent ape ancestors to my taste. As one can see by reading the news on any given day.
Wars, capitalism, climate change, rape, murder, torture, religious extremism, mass starvation while we throw out food because someone failed to buy it, etc.
It's also the reason that religious people can contentedly do horrible things - because they have no ability to make moral judgments on their own, so if their religion tells them that something that anyone with even a minimal ability to reason morally would recognize to be obviously wrong is actually right and proper, they just slavishly believe that it's right and proper.
Well… Some cannot make those judgements but some can. Those who can, and some who are told to do or believe things that contradict their sense of morality will refuse to do so. And end up having to question their leader, church, even their entire belief system. I’m speaking from experience here.
I hear this over and over but I don’t think it’s universally true.
For me, when I was still a believer, I thought and said (at one point) that religion was needed for morality only because I didn’t think too hard (as is true for many religious folk) and also because if people could be decent and moral without religion it called into question some fundamental tenets of Christianity.
At some point not long after I said this to someone, who called me out on it, I realized this idea was stupid and was easily disproven by the many good, non-religious people I knew. That was one of many realizations on my path to deconversion.
Another was encountering religious people who seemed not to have any empathy (or who had been brainwashed into having none). So probably some make that claim who are sociopaths. Anyway I was horrified by some of the statements and attitudes and that prompted further thinking.
No, they said that someone could believe that morality without religion is impossible not because they are a sociopath, but rather because they haven’t thought “too hard about it.”.
I remember when I told my mother I was an atheist and she asked me “then how do you know right from wrong?”. She is a nice person but religion was so core to her upbringing I suppose she never questioned it
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