Agnostic.com

1 4

Timeless advice

puff 8 May 9
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

1 comment

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

1

Charity and tolerance. Exactly what the religion I grew up in taught.
They didn’t teach it in any of the science classes I was exposed to.

skado Level 9 May 9, 2022

I never had a religion…nor did my parents who identified as freethinkers, but they taught me to treat everyone as I’d wish them to treat me, and to respect and tolerate other people’s beliefs and points of view.

@Marionville
Generational wisdom is the essence of authentic religion. Institutionalized religion is often corrupted. So often, in fact, that corrupt religion has become what many thinking people accept as the definition of religion.

@skado My point is that you need not have any religious belief to know it is morally right to treat others with respect.

@Marionville
I understand. My point is that “knowing” what is morally right is a religious belief. There is no scientifically objective “right” or “wrong”.

@skado I’m afraid it’s on that point that we must part company and differ. My opinion is that knowledge of what is right and what is wrong is an intrinsically human evolutionary characteristic. We know instinctively when we are doing something that isn’t moral or good. Morality has evolved over many eons from our earliest ancestors, the ones that respected the tribal mores of co-operation and didn’t go against the societal rules were the ones who thrived and survived, the transgressors were cast out or killed. You could say morality was born out of pragmatism to survive if you like, but it is most certainly very much older than any religion practised today. Unfortunately, the relatively modern Abrahamic religions - especially Christianity, have taken possession of morality and now assert that they invented it. Preach it - yes…claim you invented it - no. Its a great pity that they don’t think it’s important to practice what they preach, whether they claim it or not!

@Marionville

Well this may be getting into the weeds a bit, but here we go...

I doubt our actual beliefs are all that different. I think it's mostly a semantics problem. The thing you're calling religion (and we both agree is corrupt) I call corrupt religion. And the thing you are calling morality (and we both agree is good, and a product of various evolutionary forces ) I call authentic religion.

What you call knowledge of what is right and wrong, I would call a feeling of what is right and wrong. Feelings, or tendencies toward having certain feelings, can evolve both biologically and culturally. But I see no evidence that any act can be inherently right or wrong, or that any such inherent rightness or wrongness has any medium in which to evolve. Where would that rightness reside? So I can't say anyone "knows" any act to be objectively right or wrong.

We, most of us, certainly can feel an act to be right or wrong, and it is those tendencies to feel that have evolved, first biologically, which scientists call altruism, and then culturally, which the few scientists who study these things usually call religion.

Where you use the word "instinctively," I might use the word "intuitively" - at least regarding the culturally evolved part. The biologically evolved part could be said to be part of human instincts, but it is pretty rudimentary relative to the scope of modern human morality. The greater bulk of it is cultural, and therefore religious. What everyone of a given culture intuitively feels about morality can be very different from what inhabitants of a different culture feel. And whether a member of that culture belongs to, or practices, any specific religion, they are more or less equally saturated with the most basic of the religious norms of that culture, at the intuitive level.

Where you say 'morality was born out of pragmatism to survive,' I would have to get picky and say... our tendency to have feelings of altruism, and our tendency to absorb and intuitively feel the basic assumptions of the culture we were raised in... were born out of pragmatism to survive.

Biological altruism is definitely much older than any religion practiced today or any previous day, and universal in all human cultures, and, to a lesser extent, in some other species as well. But what any culture considers moral beyond those rudimentary universals - that is to say, what is different from one culture to the next and from one time period to the next - is created for that culture by its dominant religion.

So while rudimentary altruism, like a sense of the reciprocity of fairness, can be measured in chimpanzees, the intuitive feeling of "rightness" of more complex moral abstractions which even end up in our secular laws, like the presumption of innocence until being proven guilty, are not older than Axial Age religions, because that is exactly where they came from.

All modern, complex moral systems, legal systems, philosophical systems, educational systems, health systems, business systems, and indeed, science itself, all have their roots in the Axial Age religions. Before that time, we didn't need them. They evolved, culturally, because of, and not until, the invention of agriculture.

It isn't just religious people who don't practice what they preach. That is nothing more or less than our universal, human/animal nature resisting the not-so-natural constraints placed on us by religion in order to create civilization. What's remarkable is that those constraints work as well as they do to keep civilization functioning.

Most members of every in-group judge the out-group by its worst members, and their own group by its best members. This is equally true of atheists and theists. The truth is... they all behave exactly the same. They behave like the humans they all are. They speak well of their own kind, and poorly of all others. And they all struggle with the modifications they must make to their instinctual impulses in order to function cohesively in the artificial environment they have created for themselves.

What most atheists fail to see, I think, is that they are assuming that if they can use reason to see the glaring inconsistencies between fundamentalist religion and rational science, that everyone else could also if they just would. But I think that is not the case. That would require that the vast majority of humans were physically capable of skilled, abstract thought.

Piaget described this as Formal Operational Stage thinking. He discovered that humans typically achieve the capacity for this skill by age eleven or twelve. What has been discovered since his time is that only about ten percent of the adult population go on to fully develop that capacity into actual Formal Operational Stage thinking skills. Why this is the case is probably some combination of nature and nurture, but suffice it to say, that the great majority of humans simply don't have the ability to maneuver skillfully in the abstract world. They are literally creatures of symbolism and metaphor, as they were, indeed, evolved to be.

Somewhere between the number of adults who develop F.O.S. fully and those who develop it partially lies a number curiously similar to the number of atheists and non-believers in the world.

Atheists and Formal Operational thinkers have the ability to secularize their morality. 85% of the human population simply don't. Where goes the 85%, goes the whole population. Lose religion - lose civilization.

You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:665210
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.