Stumble it!LittleOleLady asks a few questions
posted in Religion by themaiden |I have a few answers.
Noting a recent survey which reports that “91 percent of American adults surveyed believe in God”, LittleOleLady asks, among other things:
The short answer is that belief in God has precious little to do with morality, per se, despite myths to the contrary. Dig around in history a little and it isn’t hard to see why I say so. Humans have never been especially moral, no matter who they were or what God happened to be fashionable at the time. We’ve always been a vicious violent lot. We’ve always had thieves, liars, and psychopaths. We’ve always had those favorite scapegoats for moral decay; homosexuals, prostitutes and abortion or outright infanticide.
At times, a belief in God may have attenuated some vicious behavior or another. At other times, belief in God has done just the opposite, as when ‘God’ orders a holy war against infidels or heretics, or just commands his people to kidnap, rape, and pillage the lands occupied by the heathens, as repeated so often in the Old Testament. The point being that belief in God doesn’t make people ‘good’ in any consistent way.
What a belief in God can do, and has done throughout history, is help form a solidarity among members of a community providing a roughly unified ideology and by serving as a kind of club to bash dissenters into line with that ideology. This is no doubt adaptive in many circumstances, but it has very little to do with any abstract morality. It has to do with culturally embedded biases– learned from experience, not from God– and peer pressure. Belief in God makes people lean in the same general direction. It doesn’t make them lean in the ‘moral’ direction.
Unfortunately, as adaptive as religion may have been, and may still be in some places, it is also based in some very outmoded intellectual technology– folklore, folk knowledge, creative guesswork. Like stone tools and the chariot, religion needs to be replaced by something more powerful and more reliable.
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