On Aug 11, 2005, at 11:24 PM, Ritu wrote:
I know too many people whose morality seems to be
hinged on their religious beliefs. And I'm not sure how they would act
if that constraint is removed. Y'see, they are devout believers who
seem
more worried about offending God than about causing pain to another
person.
That's one of the objections atheists occasionally run into. "If you
don't believe in a god, what's stopping you from being a terrible
person?"
The answer is: Empathy. The ability to put myself (or try to put
myself) into the shoes of another, to understand that just as I
wouldn't like it if someone mugged me, I shouldn't be willing to put
someone else through that same unhappiness. It's a fundamental trait of
a developed and whole personality.
I'd really rather have them afraid of God's judgment if that
means that they behave better. :)
But that's not what it means, demonstrably. See, this "god's judgment"
thing has a back door. Many people who claim to "love" and/or "fear" a
god don't seem to live by it, because they've got that "repentance"
escape route. They can be perfect bastards, and often are, and feel
they're going to be OK because they can confess or fall back on some
atonement myth.
That effectively removes responsibility for actions from the individual
-- the consequences are, in the person's mind, negated, so they really
don't have to worry much about "earthly" affairs, and furthermore they
can point to some phantom "afterlife" in which the last shall be first,
the meek shall inherit the earth and so on. (It's a short hop from that
kind of thinking, BTW, to bombing abortion clinics or subways.)
Frankly, self-responsible atheists have much more motivation not to
fuck up, and to do their best to make amends in the *here and now* when
they do fuck up, than many religious people do.
I'm very dubious of the value of religion overall, and I'm certainly
not inclined to agree that I'd rather have someone believe than not in
order to keep that person in line. If a person's sense of human ethics
and decency is so askew that the only thing keeping him under control
is terror of retribution, then that person is a weakling, emotionally
and psychologically crippled, and certainly should not be permitted to
have influence on the lives of others, much as we wouldn't allow a
person with an IQ of 50 to run a nuclear reactor (though being
president is fine).
What this probably means in practice is that there are literally
millions of Americans whom I would judge as emotionally,
psychologically and ethically incompetent, at least by these criteria.
I'm okay with that. They probably are.
But that isn't really *faith* -- it's occultism given legitimacy. Real
faith is much harder to nail down. As Doug mentioned optimism is faith,
or at least can be seen as a manifestation of it. You don't have to
have a religious focus to have faith in *something*, even if it's in an
innate decency in people, any more than you need to have faith to be
virulently and hatefully religious.
--
Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books
http://books.nightwares.com/
Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror"
http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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