Christians sometimes ask atheists, “If you don’t believe in God, how can you be a moral person?”
The question is really two questions. First, how do you know what is moral without being told by a religious authority? Second, how do you control your impulses without the threat of divine punishment? I addressed the first question in last post, and the second question in this post.
How Does an Atheist Become a Moral Person?
The answer is simple. You choose to be a moral person. Personal morality is based on personal values, which can be derived through lived experience, observation of other humans, and self-reflection. I believe the most important human values developed through this process are empathy, truth, justice (i.e., equity, fairness) and responsibility. Other core values include service, progress, respect for nature & animals, self-care and liberty. Not everyone who observes and reflects on the human condition gets there; there are a lot of people whose world-views are based on self-interest and bullying others. But the morality of the four core values of empathy, truth, justice and responsibility should be indisputable. Atheists and religious people alike should agree that these are the foundation of morality, based on the precepts of caring for other people and doing the least harm.
“The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that.
Penn Jillette, of the illusionist team Penn and Teller
The entire question of morality, of course, concerns people who are interested in being moral. There exists a distressing percentage of people who have no interest in being moral and act entirely for their own self-interest. According to popular media, about 1% of men are psychopaths, and up to 4 % of men are sociopaths; a somewhat smaller percentage applies to women. This blog post is not about them. This blog post is about the people who aspire to live moral lives, and their reasons for doing so.
A good friend just posted a question on social media regarding religion and morality. She asked her religious friends (excluding the non-religious) this question: “Does either fear of hell or promise of heaven/good rebirth affect your choices/behavior? If so, which is the stronger motivator?” She had about a dozen responses. Interestingly, in all of the current responses there was no consideration for consequences in the afterlife due to their decisions and behavior. (I think that I read one response that half-heartedly admitted to fearing punishment after death, but it seems that response was deleted. So it may be that people don’t want to admit that fear in public.) The question was posed by someone who is generally on the liberal side of the political spectrum, and I presume that her respondents are also liberal. A conservative group may produce different results. But with those caveats, this group makes their moral decisions in the same way as atheists – according to principles of right and wrong, and consideration of doing good or harm to other people. The only religious motivation mentioned in the responses was that the joy of a religious life gave encouragement to do good works. Religious joy may be a motivation for religious people, but that does not imply that atheists are immoral. Like many religious people, atheists find joy in doing good deeds for the sake of doing good.
Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash
Does Religion Make People Moral?
If people require the discipline of a God to be moral, are they really moral? If fear of God is the motivating factor to behave with kindness and justice toward other people, is that behavior moral, or simply fearful? Coerced behavior isn’t rooted in morality. For people who are only moral because of the threat of eternal damnation, the only thing that matters is avoiding punishment. When religious doctrine becomes the authority for what is moral, morality itself is distorted. Religious doctrine has no clear foundation of ethical morality.
Let’s briefly consider the historical record for Christianity and morality.
If religion (specifically Christianity) actually produced moral behavior, would the world have seen the cruelty associated with the following Christian campaigns through history?
- Systematic persecution of pagans and Jews in the late Roman Empire and Middle Ages.
- The coerced conversion of Northern and Eastern Europe to Christianity around 1000 CE, enforced by unspeakable torture and murder.
- The Crusades, from 1100 CE to 1300 CE.
- Burning of heretics at the stake in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
- Burning of witches at the stake in the Renaissance.
- The repression of science in the Renaissance, through arrest and threatened torture.
- The Italian and Spanish Inquisitions of the Renaissance, marked by repression, torture and murder.
- The conquest, enslavement and exploitation of Native Americans and other indigenous groups in the course of conversion to Christianity.
- European wars of religion from 1400 CE to 1700 CE.
The Christian Bible had reached its current form by about 400 CE. By 1000 CE, Christianity was a mature religion, and Christian principles of loving your neighbor, of forgiveness and non-violence should have been well-established. Brutality in the name of Christianity continued for the next 900 years. Mark Twain, a relatively recent author, decried the brutality of Christianity during his time, in writings such as “Letters from the Earth”, “The War Prayer”, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”, “The Chronicle of Young Satan”, and “Grief and Mourning for the Night”.
Across centuries, religious doctrine sometimes corrects errors of the past, with actions ranging from Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses to the belated admission by the Catholic Church, after 359 years, that its conviction of Galileo was wrong. Missionaries no longer use torture and murder to convert adherents of other religions. But after a millennium and a half of cruel subjugation of people with other beliefs, can we really say that religion can claim any high ground with respect to morality?
Historian Thomas Cahill argues that every human culture practiced some form of human sacrifice prior
to encountering Christianity. That is an improvement, but relative to other crimes of Christianity it is a fairly low bar. It seems to me that Christianity did not become less brutal according to its own principles, but rather in accordance with the general improvement of human behavior over the very long term. Steven Pinker documents this gradual improvement well in his books “Enlightenment Now” and “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. The arc of moral history does bend toward justice in the long run, but not necessarily because of religion.
The Origin of Moral Authority
Morality derived from religious authority is necessarily suspect, because religious authority is often concerned with behavioral issues other than care or harm to others. Christianity, Islam and Hinduism have many moral laws about sexual issues, including gender identity, sexual orientation, interracial or intercaste relationships, abortion, contraception and sexual liberty. There are also many non-sexual restrictions specific to women, including the freedom of women to work, study, to refuse compulsory dress, or even the freedom to appear in public alone.
There are religious decrees asserting moral control over other aspects of life. Western societies have slowly loosened these restrictions, but in my lifetime, local government typically restricted business hours and activity to ensure observance of the sabbath. There are religious decrees concerning caste status, cutting hair or not cutting hair, eating or not eating certain foods, wearing hats or not wearing hats, all of which infringe on the fundamental moral value of liberty. Some religious moral dictums are arbitrary traditions, and some reflect ancient health concerns, but many aspects of religious morality exist to perpetuate religious control. Some religious moral standards exist in order to perpetuate patriarchy, slavery, caste systems, or social hierarchy. There is no real moral authority for these religious judgments.
Considering all of this, moral authority from religion is null and void. People who take moral guidance from their religious authorities are mistaken. True morality comes from consideration of the well-being, rights, freedom, and feelings of other people. Religious issues outside of those considerations are morally irrelevant.
Atheists in religious societies (as we all are) are necessarily independent-thinkers. Perhaps atheists understand the origins of morality and its foundation in human values better than religious people.
Moral Dilemmas and Conflicts
Morality necessarily involves dilemmas and conflicts. Sometimes, moral considerations are in conflict for different people in a particular situation. Indeed, moral conflicts are nearly ubiquitous in civil discourse. An example might be the fishing rights of indigenous people, where their need for sustenance competes with the need to protect wild fishing stocks. Other examples might include conscientious objections to military service, restricting the liberty to own guns to improve public safety, requiring vaccinations and masking in certain jobs to prevent the spread of disease, or setting immigration quotas for asylum and resettlement.
As an atheist, humanist and western liberal, there are some common notions of morality that I reject. I reject nationalism and patriotism. I reject restrictive norms of sexual identity and behavior, except for actions involving minors, actions with those incapable of knowledgeable consent, relationships with a power differential, and relationships which cause harm to others in a committed relationship. Otherwise, the moral value of personal liberty should prevail.
I recognize truth, self-care, and liberty as core moral values of a different kind. These are values which do not directly benefit or harm other people or nature, but exist as moral values for their own sake. These values are sometimes in conflict with other values, such as when a doctor must comfort a dying patient, or times when self-care is in conflict with serving others.
There is one value, one of the top four values in my opinion, for which mystical religions are clearly immoral. That value is truth. As I hope to show in the final essays for this blog, mystical religion fails every test of rationally determined truth.
Truth is part of morality, and religion isn’t true. Therefore, I conclude that religion is immoral.
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The image of Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash is used without permission and not for profit. It will be removed upon request. This seems like a sufficient moral accommodation.
