Morals and Religion in Theory and Practice

1. Deriving (Absolute) Morals from Religious Texts
   1. Finding What You Were Looking For In a Religious Text
   2. Subjectivism Prevents the Revealing of Absolute Morals
2. The Diversity of Morals Within Belief Systems
3. An Individual's Morals
   1. Moralizing: Being Religious in Order to Be a Good Person
   2. Theism: Dogmatism and Legalism
   3. Theism: Rewards and Punishment
   4. Religious Beliefs
4. Mistaken Focus of Religious Ethics on the Mystical Individual
5. Religious Morals in Action
   1. Introductions
   2. Religions Versus Human Rights and Equality
6. Secular Sources of Morals
   1. Human Communities Share Most Morals No Matter What Religion They Are
   2. Animal Morality and Evolution

1. Deriving (Absolute) Morals from Religious Texts

1.1. Finding What You Were Looking For In a Religious Text

When people approach a religious text, or any large book from which they intend to derive ethical teachings, nearly without exception the person will pick up the book and pay very particular attention to all the morals they already agree with. A homophobe will pick up the Christian Bible and realise that homosexuality is an evil sin. A misogynist will pick up the Bible or Qur'an and realise that after all this time he's right: Women are inferior, and he can quote the Bible or Qur'an to prove it. A fluffy liberal will read it and find all the hippy love-thy-neighbour bits and therefore will be able to prove that all those homophobes and misogynists have it wrong. People mostly get, from religious texts, what they put into them.

1.2. Subjectivism Prevents the Revealing of Absolute Morals

It is said by some that God decides on an absolute level what is Good or Bad. Some even say that such Divine definitions are the requirement for being judged worthy to enter Heaven: If your actions do not match goodness, then you fail. As such some religionists hold that absolute morals are highly important and that firm belief in a particular religion is what is required of us, according to God.

Every person who reads a long text will understand it differently, as each one of us is unique in our character and experience of life. All of our brains are wired up differently; it is impossible for any two people to share exactly the same understanding of anything at all. In epistemology, this basic fact is called subjectivism. A person who reads a holy text will have to judge it, analyze it and think through it and in the process every person observes a different set of moral rules.

Where holy text can appear to very definitely uphold one person's opinions there are others who are sure it does not. Christianity, Islam and other religions with sacred texts proceed to splinter as people interpret the texts in different ways and assert that their way is right. It is impossible for two people to read anything but the most basic sentence without them forming differing opinions of what the text implies.

The creator god is the supremely intelligent one responsible for creating the way that mankind's brains work; such a being must realize that Human Beings can only interpret life subjectively, and that no text will mean the same thing for any two people. But, into the world they place texts written in transitory human languages, filled with cultural references and complicated symbolism that is certainly going to be misunderstood more and more as time goes on.

Therefore by design, any sacred text only contains guidelines or pointers to moral codes of behaviour, and no actual absolutes. To try and write an absolute into a text that can only ever be interpreted subjectively is pointless, especially in theoretical matters such as morality, where scientific investigation is generally fruitless.

A moral absolute is a statement that is implied to be utterly correct, divine in nature. However, as all people are going to think of that moral in a different way, it is useless even speculating what they might be, and any such attempt to state it would be useless and result in a whole range of opinions - moral absolutes only apply to omniscient beings, for other beings they can only be pointers and recommendations.

2. The Diversity of Morals Within Belief Systems

The fact that in Christianity and Islam, for example, there are so many different interpretations of what behaviour is moral, means that the religions themselves are not sources of morality. Culture and deliberation are their true sources. Compare the morality of the Church during the dark ages to liberal wings of Christianity today: they are seemingly opposites! But both stem from the same religion, from the same religious books. Likewise in the Muslim world, compare religiously-driven violent fundamentalists to religiously-driven pacifists. Both justify their actions by their beliefs. It seems that the existence of such diversity within religions undermines any claim that those religions tap into any source of divine morality.

3. An Individual's Morals

3.1. Moralizing: Being Religious in Order to Be a Good Person

Religions almost universally emphasize the moral duty of the individual. ‘God knows all’ as the Qur’an and Bible repeat: examples in the Christian Bible include Job 28:24, 37:16; 1 John 3:19-20; and very frequently in the Qur’an: the first chapter (after the introduction) iterates God’s omniscience ten times, for example Sura 2:29, 77, 85, 115 and 137. We all answer to God eventually. Buddhism and Hinduism likewise teach that we pay the consequences of this life throughout our next. So many people come to think of religions as being a bastion of moral thinking, because, religions tend to dramatize and exaggerate the rewards and punishments of good and bad behaviour. This emphasis is particularly strong amongst laypeople: despite their record against human rights on an institutional and national level, locally popular religions are often seen as a force for good. Hence, if someone wants to be good or, wants to be seen as good, they will gravitate towards religion.

Doctrine has even often been specifically formulated with behaviour-control in mind. Origen, one of the founding (Christian) Church Fathers, argued that while the actual terrors of hell were false, they were useful for scaring simpler believers. Plutarch calls hell an ‘improving myth’₁.

But this isn't the whole story, because, it happens that people can also adopt non-religious and secular philosophies in order to promote good moralizing. Movements such as Humanism (and institutions such as the British Humanist Association) are devoted to encouraging moral behavior, moral thinking, overall conscientiousness and rationality. The main difference is, it seems that many traditional religious groups think that they are the sole (or best) reserve of moral goodness.

3.2. Theism: Dogmatism and Legalism

Dogmatic and legalistic behaviour is not 'moral' behaviour. Simply obeying rules, tradition and dogmatic answers to moral questions does not make a person moral. Morality requires choices, and the more that a person relies on a "text book of morality" or pre-laid rules, the less they are acting as a moral person. Obeying rules because you think you should is not the same as making moral choices; therefore at best such people are morally neutral, amoral. It seems that as far as morality is complicated as soon as real-life situations are encountered, those best at it will be those who have long exercised their conscience while being free of religious dogmas.

3.3. Theism: Rewards and Punishment

Aside from dogmatism, theists have a two-pronged set of incentives that serve to lessen the worth of any apparent moral act on their behalf. If I am threatened into behaving in a good manner then I am at best amoral, because I am not acting with free will. If you believe that a supreme god is going to punish you (in hell) or deny you life (annihilation) if you misbehave, it is like being permanently threatened into behaving well. In addition, if you believe there is some great reward for behaving well, then your motives for good behavior are more selfish. An Atheist who does not believe in heaven and hell is potentially more moral, for he acts without these added factors. Most atheists who do not believe in divine judgement, and most theists who do, act moral. Some of both groups act consistently immorally. The claim that belief in God is essential or aids moral behavior is wrong, and any amusing theistic claim that they have "better" morals, despite acting under a reward and punishment system, is deeply questionable. Who is more moral? Those who act for the sake of goodness itself, or those who do good acts under the belief that failure to do so results in hell?

3.4. Religious Beliefs

A good test of whether or not a person truly believes in God is to ask them what immoral behaviour they would suddenly engage in if they ceased believing.

“If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person [...]. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good.”

"The God Delusion" by Prof. Richard Dawkins (2006)₃

This test reveals the underlying truth: Good people do good things, bad people do bad things, and you can gradually change character by reflecting on the flaws of your own actions and by receiving advice and instruction from people in your community and from reading. But, there is no particular need for this input to be religious. Indeed, those who use a codified system are often less adaptable and find themselves desperately applying anachronistic moral ideas to a world where they no longer fit.

4. Mistaken Focus of Religious Ethics on the Mystical Individual

Religious systems of morality have an odd emphasis on internal thoughts, and often regard many attributes as positive that actually do no good for the world at large. Many things, such as withdrawing from the world and not engaging others when they have clearly done wrong, For example, consider the Catholic Church, which did not oppose the fascist Nazis at all in Europe and who opened their genealogical records so the Nazis could hunt Jews, and who didn't excommunicate Hitler for his crimes. The Catholic Church only selectively engages in politics, because its morality is too concentrated on individual sins, such as adultery, and not political ones, such as genocide.

“The natural impulse of the vigorous person of decent character is to attempt to do good, but if he is deprived of all political power and of all opportunity to influence events he will be deflected from his natural course and will decide that the important thing is to be good. This is what happened to the early Christians; it led to a conception of personal holiness as something quite independent of beneficent action, since holiness had to be something that could be achieved by people who were impotent in action. Social virtues came therefore to be excluded from Christian ethics. To this day conventional Christians think an adulterer more wicked than a politician who takes bribes, although the latter probably does a thousand times as much harm. The mediaeval conception of virtue, as one sees in their pictures, was of something wishy-washy, feeble, and sentimental. The most virtuous man was the man who retired from the world; the only men of action who were regarded as saints were those who wasted the lives and substance of their subjects in fighting the Turks, like St Louis. The Church would never regard a man as a saint because he reformed the finances or the criminal law, or the judiciary. Such mere contributions to human welfare would be regarded as of no importance. I do not believe there is a single saint in the whole calendar whose saintship is due to work of public utility. With this separation between the social and the moral person there went an increasing separation between soul and body, which has survived in Christian metaphysics and in the systems derived from Descartes.”

"Why I am not a Christian" by Bertrand Russell (1957)

Not only has the monotheistic system of ethics come to be based on non-Human and non-societal fantasy, but it is actively anti-Human and anti-societal. Theist morality is given justification on the basis of their beliefs. But reasonable thought, good intentions and good character all produce good morals in action, and produce them in a more fluid, sensible way. What we base on myth and religion and then write in stone, becomes stagnant, legalistic and cold: What we base on love and reason is a superior form of morality to what we derive from religion. As Viscount Samuel notes, if we base our morals on religion, sooner or later the foundation will be lost. In addition to that, it is misguided to base morals on religion in order to claim that they are unchanging as religious morality changes over time just as secular morality does, the only difference is that non-religious folk admit the change and short-sighted religious folk don't admit it. Secular morality is more honest.

5. Religious Morals in Action

5.1. Introductions

If it is the case that Christian or Islamic morals are better than others, then we should clearly see that when these religions are ascendant and popular, mass immorality should decrease. But historically and in the present era, that is not what happens. Religion causes increased social malaise in all areas. On this topic I have compiled many statistics, found on the following pages:

• "Religion, Violence, Crime and Mass Suicide" by Vexen Crabtree (2009).

• "Medical and Sexual Child Abuse In Christianity: Faith Healing and Priestly Paedophilia" by Vexen Crabtree (2009): The massive scale of child abuse within Christianity.

• "Traditional Religions and Abolition of the Slave Trade" by Vexen Crabtree (2003) - Religious organisations held on to their slaves the longest. Muslim slave companies in Africa freely sold slaves en masse to Christian shippers.

• "The Peacock vs. the Ostrich - Religious Behaviour and Sexuality" by Vexen Crabtree (2008) and "Religion Versus Womankind" by Vexen Crabtree (2007): The oppression and denial of human rights of women, the irrational stances on contraception and abortion that cause untold suffering and disease, and the hateful and horrible attitude towards homosexuals.

• "Religious Tolerance for Competing Ideas: Why is Monotheism Intolerant?" by Vexen Crabtree (2008): Monotheism shouts loudest about morality, but, is the most intolerant form of religion.

• "Anti-Semitism: 2000 Years of Christian Love" by Vexen Crabtree (2004).

• In "Time to Move On: Religion Has Cost Too Much" by Vexen Crabtree (2010) I ask: is monotheism really this bad? To answer, only look at times in history when theocracy has reigned: the dark ages of Europe, and the current dark ages in much of the Arab world, are the domains of Christianity and Islam respectively.

5.2. Religions Versus Human Rights and Equality

Unfortunately many religious charities cannot separate welfare from doctrine. Religious charities have ran long campaigns against such things as gay rights, abortion rights for women and equality of gender. Mother Theresa, for example, spent a shocking amount of time jetting around the world in her private jet meeting with political leaders to discourage them from using such horrible things as condoms and contraception (making two of Africa's worst problems, overcrowding and STDs, worse). I am sure that this is hardly the type of causes that charitable donators had in mind when they dropped money into a charity box!

“The most vocal opposition of anything that provides equality for gays are always Christians and Muslims. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Catholic church in England and Wales, backed by the Church of England₅ and the Muslim Council of Britain₆, have led a campaign to get the government to give exceptions to Catholic Adoption agencies so that they won't have to give equal rights to gay parents. He says that for reasons of conscience and morality, Catholics cannot be made to comply with the law. Tony Blair is rejecting their case, but has given them extra time to "adjust" to the new laws - they won't have to fully comply until the end of 2008₅. We will discuss the Catholic's pro-discrimination lobby later.”

"Homosexuality in Animals and Humans: 4.1. Opposition to Gay Adoption"
Vexen Crabtree (2005)

A full summary can be found at: "Homosexuality in Animals and Humans: 4.1. Opposition to Gay Adoption" by Vexen Crabtree (2005)

6. Secular Sources of Morals

6.1. Human Communities Share Most Morals No Matter What Religion They Are

“Preachers tell us that any universal moral standards can only come from one source - their particular God. Otherwise standards would be relative, depending on culture and differing across cultures and individuals. The data, however, indicate that the majority of human beings from all cultures and religions or no religion agree on a common set of moral standards. While specific differences can be found, universal norms do seem to exist. Anthropologist Solomon Asch has observed, "We do not know of societies in which bravery is despised and cowardice held up to honor, in which generosity is considered a vice and ingratitude a virtue."”

"God, the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist" by Prof. Victor J. Stenger (2007)₇

These may be called 'universal' morals but I would not accept that term on too strict a basis as I am sure that if you look, you will find exceptions. What is the source of these near-universal moral behaviours? Evolution. If we theorize that evolution (not religion) leads to common morals, then, our theory predicts that we will find moral behaviour in many social animals and that this behaviour can be explained in terms of the propagation of genes. Well, in nature, this is exactly what we find. It seems that animal morality, including Humankind's, looks exactly as it would look if there was no set of absolute morals being imparted to individuals by God.

6.2. Animal Morality and Evolution

“A considerable literature exists on the natural (biological, cultural, evolutionary) origins of morality. Darwin saw the evolutionary advantage of cooperation and altruism. Modern thinkers have elaborated on this observation, showing in details how our moral sense can have arisen naturally during the development of modern humanity.

We can even see signs of moral, or protomoral behaviour in animals. Vampire bats share food. Apes and monkeys comfort members of their group who are upset and work together to get food. Dolphins push sick members of a pod to the surface to get air. Whales will put themselves in harm's way to help a wounded member of their group. Elephants try their best to save injured members of their families.”

"God, the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist" by Prof. Victor J. Stenger (2007)₈

The quality of animal morality seems tied in perfectly with their social evolution and it seems that humanity is not particularly unique when it comes to inherent morality.

“Six rhesus monkeys were trained to pull on a variety of chains to get food. If they pulled on one chain, they got a large amount of their favourite food. If they pulled on a different chain, they got a small amount of a less enticing food. As you can probably guess, the monkeys quickly learned to pull on the chain that gave them more of what they wanted. They maximized their reward. After a few weeks of this happy setup one of the six monkeys got hungry and decided to pull on the chain. This is when something terrible happened: a separate monkey in a different cage was shocked with a painful jolt of electricity. All six monkeys saw it happen. They heard the awful shriek. They watched the monkey grimace and cower in fear. The change in their behaviour was immediate. Four of the monkeys decided to stop pulling on the maximizing chain. They were now willing to settle for less food as long as the other monkey wasn't hurt. The fifth monkey stopped pulling on either chain for five days, and the sixth monkey stopped pulling for 12 days. They starved themselves so that a monkey they didn't know wasn't forced to suffer.”

"The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind" by Jonah Lehrer (2009)₉

Sabre toothed tigers look after wounded members of their own group. There is a species of caterpillar in which members of the group sacrifice their own lives to warn their fellows of impending danger. Chimpanzees share their food to those who beg, even though it makes them angry and irritated to do so. Monkey mothers spank their young if they bully others. Male ursine seals attack their own females if they fail to take proper care of their young. The evolutionary nature of these traits is additionally proved by the fact that they occur on a species-by-species basis, just as if we would expect if these traits are coded for genetically. Neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington commented that "biology cries the individual for itself" but it is "altruism that seems as yet Nature's noblest product".₁₀

The neurological framework that facilitates moral thought is similar across animals that are evolutionarily close, and likewise, their moral behaviour is similar. It seems that biology drives morality more than religion.