| Morality (Part I) |
| Friday, May 05, 2006 |
I have been asked many times by people of god/s, what are my morals? And what I usually would say is, to do as one wishes as long as one does not harm others. To me the emphasis on liberty is really important as this distinguishes my response from a religious response. Words such as doing good and not bad, has been used by religious people to mean praying and not having sex before marriage, so I dont usually use them.
However, the first time I was questioned on this, I first replied that I had no morals. Don’t be surprised. I didn’t know much English and the only times that I heard that word was from religious people, usually Christians and Muslims, when referring to abortion, gay marriage and the like. To me, these issues were not a matter of good or bad and only concerned liberty. Based on these, I concluded that morality really means believing that personal choices that do not affect others can be bad if god says so.
The shocked faces that were staring at me, asked me, as to whether I believed it is OK to do anything that one wishes? I tried to explain that I believed one can do as they wish as long as one does not harm others. The faces became friendly again.
Bellow is my response to Raen on atheists’ morality, on God is for Suckers.
Raen: “So, how does one define “good” and “bad” if all of her beliefs come from empirical data?”
This is the simplest answer I could come up with.
Good acts: doing good to others, eg. charity.
Bad acts: doing harm to others, eg. killing.
Neutral ones: neither good nor bad, eg. what you wear.
“It seems to me that everyone thinks that her own desires / wishes are good.”
Not so. And I don’t remember anyone here say that.But desires in themselves can not be bad. It is only in acting upon those desires that result in harm to others, that one can do wrong. Even thinking of murder and rape are not bad, as they do not harm others.(others may disagree with me however)Now, sex before marriage, gay sex or marriage and the like, do not harm others, so they cannot be seen as harmful and therefore not bad.
“I’m sure that Hitler thought that ordering the deaths of 6 million Jews was a good thing to do. On what basis can you say that is wrong?”
Death of 6 million or even one person is act of inflicting harm to others, therefore it’s wrong/bad/immoral. However, he used xianity to justify his actions. So much for religion, hey?
That’s my moral code.
The biggest problem that I see religion is creating, is that you need to be told what is good and bad from someone that does not even live among us. Morality did not exist before humans. It is a man-made instrument designed in order to allow for co-existence of human beings in communities.
If god and religion are taken aside, there are no moral wrong doings in acts that do not involve harming others. Putting it simply, all the personal choices, such as, wearing short skirts, or being gay, can not be seen in anyway as wrong, but only as personal and private life matter, that is no ones business. What religion does is to decide for you on what you can do or not, even on the most personal matters imaginable, when it does not involve anyone else.
Religion is and has always been against liberty.
I’ll talk about morality in more details next time, mainly on how a religious person is not a moral agent with reference to Kant and how religious people have hijacked the word morality. |
posted by Roya @ 8:30 PM   |
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| 1 Comments: |
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That's a good start. I'll be checking back. The more the atheists the better. ;-)
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That's a good start. I'll be checking back. The more the atheists the better. ;-)