Is Religion Necessary for Morality?
From a New York Times article:
Is religion necessary for morality? Many people think it is outrageous, or even blasphemous, to deny that morality is of divine origin. Either some divine being crafted our moral sense during the period of creation or we picked it up from the teachings of organized religion. Both views see the same endpoint: we need religion to curb nature’s vices. …
Yet problems abound for the view that morality comes from God. One problem is that … there are no moral principles shared by all religious people but no agnostics and atheists. This observation leads to a second: atheists and agnostics do not behave less morally than religious believers. … The converse is also true: religion has led people to commit a long litany of horrendous crimes.
These studies begin to provide empirical support for the idea that like other psychological faculties of the mind, including language and mathematics, we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong. …These facts are incompatible with the story of divine creation.
If religion is faith in things that are not real, how can religion be about a real, genuine morality?
A morality derived from fantasies is just as much a fantasy as the religion itself.
| Go to Home - Most Recent Posts