Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Morality and Religion
I am on the fence here about these two in question. I want to say they do not depend on one another, but then when I think more and more about how heavily morality and religion intertwine with each other, it's sort of hard to make an argument. We talked in class about a fallacy example where if someone claims if you do not follow the word of God, you live a life without morals and cannot live a good life. This is where I start to question if morality actually does not depend on religion. But, when I think about it, as someone who used to be religious and is not as religious anymore, I still go by the morals set by Christianity... but not as devote as others may be. Does that mean I am immoral seeing that I am almost as far from a believer in religion as one could be? Of course not. I have incredibly strict views on some moral subjects thanks to religion, however I am just not a follower of the religion I was raised up in. A quote that got me thinking that came from The Brothers Karamazov is "If God did not exist, everything would be permissible" (8) which relates to our discussion of fallacies, but in this sense it does not necessarily blame those who don't follow God as the example of an argument from consequences fallacy would. This got me thinking how would a child from an atheist family act? Surely if the parents were like me, who started in religion and eventually left, they'd have a background of basic morals to fall back on and teach their child thus indirectly teaching the child morals of a religion. However, thinking at it a bit deeper, is any family truly atheist? If religion was created at a fixture in time, then yes a family could be truly atheist due to a decision made by a very early ancestor, but we are not certain of this nor do we know if a family is and always has been 100% atheist now and in the past. So, I'd have to imagine that all of us have received our morals from religious beliefs due to the difficulty of conjuring a scenario of the such. If you grew up atheist, you'd possibly receive morals from Christianity directly from your parents, but you yourself are not a follower of Christianity. So thanks to religion, you have morals even though you are not apart of a religion. The more I think about it, the harder it is for me to make a good argument against "morality depends on religion" (8) because of such absurd looking scenarios. It could be because of how I was taught religion that makes me think there is no way something like I aforementioned about religion being created at a fixed point in time being true because that's not how we think about religion. We think that it has always been there and always will be, so to think it could've been created at a certain time in history is absurd, which would make me think a truly atheist blood line would exist is absurd. So I'd have to agree in saying that religion is the basis of morals. Whether you learn about morals directly from the religion, or indirectly, you are learning morals thanks to religion. One could argue this by proving such a scenario that I mentioned exists, and if it does then one would be able to interview that purely atheist family and see what they think about morals. It is however a struggle to do so because we are not certain if religion is in fact from a fixated point in time (but as an atheist I'd say otherwise, but I cannot prove it).
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