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Religion and the "virtue" of not thinking

Published

on November 8, 2006

in atheism, morality, religion and thinking

. 21 Comments

A spirit sped
Through spaces of night;
And as he sped, he called,
“God! God!”
He went through valleys
Of black death-slime,
Ever calling,
“God! God!”
Their echoes
From crevice and cavern
Mocked him:
“God! God! God!”
Fleetly into the plains of space
He went, ever calling,
“God! God!”
Eventually, then, he screamed,
Mad in denial,
“Ah, there is no God!”
A swift hand,
A sword from the sky,
Smote him,
And he was dead.

- Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines

I’d like you to read the short poem above, written in 1895. What do you think?

Stephen Crane, as is obvious from reading his works, was mostly a cynic, believing in man as a victim of an uncaring, sometimes malevolent universe. The poem above is quite illustrative of that.

But, though it is a parable, we can look at it literally, too. What happens, actually, in that poem?

A man inquires, investigates, uses his senses, his mind, and his reason, and comes to the natural, quite obvious conclusion. He is then punished for it.

According to most theists, he deserved it, too. Because faith — blind faith — is praised as a good thing. Belief without evidence is good. Doubt — even (and sometimes especially) if it comes from using one’s mind — is condemned. God, according to them, doesn’t have any responsibility to show himself, or the slightest trace of his existence. In fact, if you start to learn a little about the world, everything around you will appear completely natural. It’s as if God created a universe whose purpose is to convince people he doesn’t exist, to lead men away from him.

And yet, he supposedly rewards those who don’t think, and punishes - with eternal suffering - those who do.

The God in that poem, if he existed, would be an evil, immoral god. And yet it’s him — exactly like that, instead of one who rewarded intelligence and honest inquiry — that theists believe in, worship, and think of as “all-good, all-loving”.

Why? Well, an Atlas Shrugged quote by Dr. Floyd Ferris, one of the villains, comes to mind:

You see, Dr. Stadler, people don’t want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they’ll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking.

I think that explains it — how people can turn “not thinking” (not questioning, not doubting, not inquiring, not investigating, not asking) into a virtue. Why many preach it, and why even more follow it.

The Origin of Morality

Published

Pedro Timóteo

on September 21, 2006

in morality and reason

. 48 Comments

Note: this post is a reply to a comment by Matt in a previous thread.

Where does morality come from, anyway?

Most theists believe it comes from God. In other words, morality - or “good” - is obeying God. Whatever it is that God wants, becomes moral; it follows that doing what God doesn’t want is immoral.

Putting aside, for now, the problem of determining what God really wants (not to mention whether he actually exists), which should already be enough reason not to accept this definition of morality, there’s a more important problem here: it’s arbitrary.

If morality is simply obeying or pleasing some being (whether human or divine), what about that being’s own morality? What if that being is wrong, or actually “evil”? I’ve dealt with this one before, in The Morality of God. What most theists do, here, is say that God is “above morality” - that he can’t be judged by us, or by anyone, that whatever God does is by definition “good”, and any rules he gives us don’t apply to him. In other words, if I kill someone, it’s immoral (not because murder is wrong for any reason, but simply because God said so), but if God kills someone, he was moral in doing so… because he sets the rules.

I believe it stands to reason that morality 1) must apply to each and everyone, instead of having someone “above morality” (much like a ruler can’t be above the law), and 2) can’t come just from someone’s desires or whims. If I believed God existed, but was evil, I wouldn’t worship him anyway - and if the price for that was hell, then, as I’ve read somewhere, nobody would be safe from such a monster anyway.

Now, a great many people believe, instead, that morality comes from society, that it’s defined by what society believes - or, in other words, by what most people believe. To them, morality is simply a social construct, there’s no reason why this is moral and that is immoral, other than it being accepted so by society.

If you think a little about it, it should be obvious that this way of thinking has the same problem: it’s arbitrary. Who’s to say that the majority is always right? Not a long time ago, slavery was accepted. Was it moral, back then? Did it become “wrong” only after most people came to believe it was wrong?

What about some of the more primitive Muslim countries today, where women are seen as downright inferior beings, with no voice at all, and rape is OK? Is it “moral” to do so, just because that’s what most people there believe? What about racism? Just a few decades ago, non-whites were seen as inferior… were they really inferior? Was it “moral” to be a racist, at the time?

What should define “moral”, then? I don’t have an absolute answer, but, in my opinion, morality should come from one’s love of life, from empathy to other human beings, and from rational principles.

I don’t kill my neighbor for his money. Why don’t I do it? Not because some god told me not to. Not because society tells me not to. Not because of fear of punishment - either divine or legal.

Instead, I don’t do it - and I don’t feel tempted to do it - because I don’t want to live in a world where people kill their neighbors for their money. That’s not a rational, civilized world; it’s a world of brutes, of beasts, of predators. That’s not the world I want for me, for my family, for my friends, and for my kids (when I have them).

I want to live as a rational being, and, to me, it’s moral to do so. I need no “compulsion” from God or society.

The "morality" of God

Published

Pedro Timóteo

on September 15, 2006

in christianity, morality and religion

. 14 Comments

In the Dwindling in Unbelief blog, there’s a post about how many people God has killed in the Bible (assuming all of it is true, of course). As the author says, many times the number isn’t stated (such as “every firstborn in Egypt”, or “that entire city”, or “everyone in the world except Noah and his wife”), but there are also many times where it is. The author is only counting those, of course.

The number, by the way, is 2,270,365. Not too bad.

Now (again, assuming that it all happened), we could argue whether those people really deserved to be killed, or whether some were killed just because of innocent mistakes, or for waging war on Israel (or having Israel wage war on them), or simply for already living in a land that God had “promised” to the Israelites.

Surely, if we were talking about a human being - say, an emperor of a large empire - instead of a deity who created the universe, we’d be describing him using terms such as “cruel”, “sadistic”, “insane”, “mass-murderer”, and “with temper tantrums like those of a spoiled child”. But we don’t - after all, this is God, right?

Because… well, we could say that “for God, there are different standards of morality”. But it’s more than that. For most Christians (and theists in general), God is the standard of morality!

Their belief goes like this: whatever God does, is moral. Whatever God wants, is good. Goodness is obeying God - if God wants the murder of someone, murdering that someone is good. Same thing for torture, rape, and so on. There are no objective standards of morality; it all comes from a single being and his desires.

In my opinion, that is a hideous way of thinking. By defining good as “what God wants”, you are refusing all standards; we all become rats in a maze. It’s no different than, say, having a mad, sadistic emperor who orders people tortured or killed on whims - and yet he is above any law, as he’s the emperor.

Therefore, we get comments like this one, in that post’s discussion:

The question you did not ask was; Is God justified in killing these people.

If God is who He says He is, then He is justified in all that He does. He is the ultimate standard for what is just and unjust.

He can kill who He pleases and is righteous in doing it.

Repugnant. How anyone can believe such a thing… is beyond me.

What if there is a god, but he’s evil? What if he’s cruel, sadistic, and demands human sacrifice, like the Aztecs believed their gods did? Is it “moral” to obey such a being? The author of that comment - who, I believe, is representative of most Christians - would believe so.