Morality & Religion (Book Notes: GOD.com)

Most religious believers tend to connect religion and morality in such a way that one becomes unthinkable without the other. Thus true, genuine religion necessarily makes one a more moral person while being a moral person signifies that one has and requires true religion. None of this is true, though - the connection between religion and morality is at best incidental.

In GOD.com: A Deity for the New Millennium, John A. Henderson writes:

Don't point to the wonderful things that good people do for their fellow man and call that religion. That is morality. There are many good, moral people. Most of the individuals whom I know as moral and worthwhile citizens would be that way even if they never went to church and never had a religion.

Over and over, we are told that people need religion. In reality, people want what religion offers: a rulebook, which provides order in their lives and gives them hope for life after death. I am not saying there is no value in religion. I argue that there is more harm than good in organized religions.

I'd like people to focus closely on "people want what religion offers: a rulebook, which provides order in their lives..." Another way of putting this is to say that people want and need order structure, direction, and security in their lives. Is that so bad? Not really — quite a lot of what people do are directed towards securing just those things. Isn't a major purpose of community and society to create structure, order, and security?

It can be argued, then, that one of the major reasons for the existence of religion is that it is a means for creating some of the things which people naturally and necessarily seek. We certainly can't argue that providing structure and direction in one's life is a bad thing, so that's not a reason to criticize religion. What's left is the means by which religion achieves such goals. No one can reasonably dispute the fact that there will be better and worse ways to create structure, direction, purpose, or security in our lives. Few will dispute the fact that religion is at least capable of achieving such goals in worse rather than better ways.

The question then becomes, upon what basis do we evaluate religion? Nonbelievers don't have much trouble with this question because they will evaluate religion on basically the same basis and against the same standards as they will evaluate any other ideology, belief system, world view, etc. What's so hard about that? Believers, however, don't typically regard their religion or religion generally as being in the same general category as other ideologies and belief systems. Religion is treated as special — indeed, one's own religion is often treated as having a divine origin.

This means that it's not just communication about religion is difficult, but communication about evaluating religion is very difficult.

 

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