Monday, July 20, 2009

Godless Morality



I can't speak for everyone but as an atheist (or anti-theist) I can answer my own perspective.

I really have very few absolutes in morality, even killing can sometimes be justified (i.e. food, defense, etc...) same with stealing, lying, etc...

One of the few absolutes I do have are rape, I have never found a just reason for this to occur.

I think a lot of my morality comes from my beliefs that I am an animal and I have a overwhelming responsibility to preserve our species (a very primal and instinctual need) This is why I care about the welfare of minorities and children, why I don't want to hurt other human beings, why I want to preserve our habitat (the earth) and why I don't want to bring our society to chaos (i.e. raping, stealing from, killing people in my society)

It may be hard to understand but even without the bible or other dogmatic book there are many sources to get a good idea of morality. Myths and stories are chocked full of moral messages to humanity, even bible stories aren't bad in and of themselves (ok, some are, King Nebakanezer and Job stand out to me as some of the worst morals in the bible) as long as they are taken as literary myth (which is what they are)

My point is that man made all these things (from Christian God to Zeus) and we have been figuring out our morality since we became capable of abstract reasoning. Abstract reasoning is the only reason we think about morality in the first place, otherwise it wouldn't come up at all. But, if you look at a herd of elephants while they don't have the reasoning or the moral teachings of religion (or any other source) they still take care of their young and sick, grieve for their dead, and work to preserve their community, all this without a bible or a God.

I know this is a bit long winded but my point is that human beings invented God to:

a) Control a vast uneducated majority
b) Remove responsibility from themselves when they do act immorally or aren't strong enough to act independently (i.e. the satan made me do it defense or " turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him" in AA)

There is nothing wrong with a personal relationship with a god you believe in, it can give you strength when you feel you have none, the problem comes with the fact that you if you believe, it's an entire lifestyle.

If you believe you have some sort of greater realization about the creation of the universe and everything in it, including yourself, you can't keep it to yourself.

If you actually believe that your God holds all the answers to life then you will follow anything that claims to be his work because you have to, IT'S GOD. This leads to horrible acts and makes it hard to socially evolve, which is how this comes back to same sex marriage.

Human beings are capable of despicable acts because they feel they are acting on behalf of a higher power and a greater purpose. Instead of learning new things and furthering our intelligence it would seem that religion has haltered our social and moral evolution, it continues to pull us back to medieval thought processes despite the fact that we should be dispelling these ancient ideas based on new knowledge.

My biggest peeve comes from the idea that "we figured it out", religious types are convinced that they know "the purpose to life", that they figured out why we are here and all the secrets to the universe (god made them...) and that they figured it out before we had indoor plumbing! They have the arrogance to point out the fallacies of science, the points where it went wrong and we proved ourselves incorrect. But, the people who reject the idea of an omnipotent, omnipresent god have a better insight into this. We don't know, we'ver never known and while it seems we know less than before we know less and less about more and more, and that's what matters.

There is no shame in humbling in the face of our own ignorance as long as we strive to know more, religion tells us we don't need to do that because it already has the answers, except, it doesn't.

I know this was really long winded and I went on a few digressions but hopefully this explains my position on morality without deity.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

thought: are you writing this at work when you should be working or calling me?

hmm i'm going to tell your boss so you get fired and have to be a west coast hobo!

i'll read it i swear, but so far i use my find option to search my own name.

love you