Stumble it!Not so much “contradiction”…
posted in Philosophy by themaiden |… as not paying attention.
The blogger, Parabiodox, whose blog I have not been able to access for weeks– page not found errors all over the place– thinks he’s caught me in a contradiction. Quoting from one of my posts he writes:
“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 …”
but then goes on to say -
“The short answer is that belief in God has precious little to do with morality, per se, despite myths to the contrary.”
Do you see the contradiction here ? Community cohesion, a sense of belonging, a feeling of belonging, is very central to how communities act in a moral way. Which is why the Christian Church has always been strong on community spirit.
The two statements are not absolutely contradictory but they do not square with each other.
Christians have always believed that Christianity should bring a shared sense of value, a community of spirit, with like minded people. This heightens the moral teaching of the Church, it is the adhesive which binds and holds it together.
Without Religion what would Atheists have to live for ?
Quote pulled from Google’s cache, as I haven’t been able to access the original in weeks
Hmm… could have sworn I said “belief in God”, per se– that is, belief in God in and of itself– has little to do with morality, not that “religion” has little to do with community cohesion. The two are not the same, though there is a relationship as I rather explicitly stated.
Let’s start with per se.
Whether or not a belief in God promotes ‘moral’ behavior depends upon 1) what a person happens to think is moral behavior and 2) what kind of behavior a person happens to think God wants. ‘Gods’ have at different times and in different places promoted all kinds of vicious nonsense. History proves the point. ‘Gods’ have at other times and in other places promoted quite the opposite. History proves that point too. However, no matter what the ‘Gods’ have promoted, humans have always been rather nasty critters. Again, history proves the point. Consequently it isn’t possible to draw a direct connection between belief, per se, and moral behavior.
But yes, a belief in a God, or in set of Gods, can foster social cohesion, but cohesion isn’t the same as moral behavior. The Nazis had some damn spiffy cohesion going for awhile there, but few argue they behaved morally. The same case can be made with other groups as well including, assuming the stories are true, the genocide in the Old Testament, as pointed out in my earlier post. So cohesion, in and of itself, also has nothing to do with morality.
Religion, or any other ideology, might help weld people together but whether or not that is a good thing for either the welded-together group or its neighbors is another matter. As I wrote previously, religion can “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.” ‘Bashing’ doesn’t really imply ‘morality’, nor does ‘bashing in line with that ideology’ mean bashing in line with a morally desirable ideology. Of course, this bashing into line “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.”
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