TannoH
My conundrum has been this: How does an individual understand morality without a religion?
Though his sense of self-preservation. This is an intuition that does not have to be taught to anyone.
Let me extrapolate. We have articles and declarations and bills of rights, and we have religious creeds and codes, but we do not have a clear, secular understanding of basic human right and wrong, do we? For example, even the United States Constitution is influenced heavily by religious ideals and morality during the time it was written, and I'd be gallant enough to assume many other cultures' foundations share this fate.
I have been taught that the United States constitution was based on secular values and on the enlightenment. On the other hand, USA became one of the most religious governments. I also believe the US constitution was based on "natural rights", which is based on "natural law". A philosophical position that rights can be derived from nature. The founders who wrote the US constitution aren't as religious as later revisionists would like you to believe. Thomas Jefferson has many quotes which shows his disapproval of Christianity and religion. In fact, he wrote his own Bible, where he basically threw out all the supernatural stuff.
Also, Christianity doesn't have much of a moral framework of its own. It borrows heavily from Jewish sources, then throws most of it out again. Modern Christianity gets more of its morality and customs from cultural sources than religious sources. As a former Christian, I would say that "strong sense of morality" is actually "pious arrogance", the exact kind that Christianity was trying to fight in the beginning.
Do you think morality is achievable without a religion? I cannot analyze myself as an example as I was raised a christian and pursued that way of life for years before letting it go. So to sum it up, I know that I am a person with strong moral values, but I have no idea what I would be like were I not influenced from a young age with clear definitions of 'good and evil.' Your most clever thoughts please!
Whether you, or the people who made up those rules, believe that they are what some divine power wants, or they came up with them due to practical social pressures, or they came out of philosophical introspection and debate, the result is the same. The society you live in indoctrinated you with the morals and values prevalent in that society. In your particular society those values and morals happened to be those of the prevalent religion. But that is incidental. If your family and other social influences as a child had not been religious, the values and morals you learned as a child might have been somewhat different, but probably not any more different than if you had just been raised by parents of some other religion.
And in any event, if you investigated the issue deeply, I think you would find that the particular values and morals you learned were more a function of the particular culture you were raised in, than your specific religion. For example, a Catholic, Lutheran, Jew, Muslim, and atheist, all born and raised in midwest America, are all going to end up with pretty similar values. They would probably all have far more in common morally with each other than, for example, the Muslim would with a Muslim from Iran, or the Catholic would with a Catholic from 500 years ago.
But yes, "morality" is definitely achievable without religion. I know how this doesn't make sense to some of you. Your morality is defined by the authority of a deity. No deity, no morality. But how do you know your morality is better than, say, Islam or Zorastrian morality? Try to give a reason that doesn't involve a reference to your cultural situation. In asking this question, you have to justify your morality against others, so you must have a standard for morality, (even if implicit), by which you measure standards. You probably have a moral standard to differentiate the different sects within your religion. If you can do that, then anyone can do it, even atheists. In the end, the deity dictating morality is less important than the moral justification you give yourself based on cultural values.
