Does Religion Improve Morality?
10
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9 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Hitchens mostly got it right. Religion seems to have provided a platform for most of the evils on earth, even while well-intentioned people insist on continuing to believe in a god.
Kennebec11
Level 4
Apr 29, 2018
0
Interesting to consider that the societies now generally deemed the most caring to live in, the most civil in how they assist the needy and compassionately reform the rule breakers,--The Netherlands and Scandinavian countries...those are for the most part the least religious societies. They are mostly nominally religious at most.
MikeInBatonRouge
Level 8
Apr 17, 2018
1
We are simply not served by believing what is not true, you must lie to yourself to believe it, step one in compromising your morals.
ArdentAtheist
Level 8
Apr 17, 2018
1
That and you'd expect Christians to be under-represented (rather than slightly over-represented) in prison populations. Also Christianity seems to be a fail in terms of other potential benefits to believers. Christians also "enjoy" slightly higher rates of divorce for example.
mordant
Level 8
Apr 17, 2018
2
If I put a gun to your head and made you do something evil, you would not be less moral for doing it. If you believe in the threat of eternal damnation and that makes you do something good, you are not moral for doing it. Religion cannot make you more moral.
DJVJ311
Level 7
Apr 17, 2018
3
Would it be correct to say the same thing about laws?
skado
Level 9
Apr 17, 2018
2
@AwarenessNow Thank you. That’s my point.
@AwarenessNow Using the logic of the meme, you should be able to make a similar statement about the law... such as:
If the law kept people from misbehaving
Police wouldn't shoot unarmed kids
Federal Building bombers wouldn't exist
Students wouldn't have to fear for their lives
What"s wrong with this logic?
If socialism improved morality, we wouldn't have us who resist the looting, extortion, bribes, and fraud.
Or politicians & bureaucrats.
Same authoritarian nightmare, same barbaric result....
moxy
Level 4
Apr 17, 2018
3
Where did that comparison come from? Is socialism equated with lack of religion?
I want to point out that both socialism and capitalism are quite broad economic frameworks. They are NOT forms of government in and of themselves. You can see both in dictatorships/oligarchies, and in democracies. And neither capitalism nor socialism seem able to exist in pure form in any large societies for protracted duration. Both seem to need each other to mitigate their more extreme weaknesses. Pure socialism would severely choke off motivation to work hard or be productive. Pure capitalism would spiral inevitably toward monopolies in which very very few win it all, while everyone else is shit out of luck. Remember those history lessons about the robber barons and the first anti-trust laws enacted to keep them from taking over?
Something other than socialism or capitalism seems to be at play on the questions of morality and of kindness.
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