Often in the forums of Reporternews.com are discussions on religion and morality. Some assert that we cannot have one without the other. That indeed, if religion is morality, then secularism is utter immorality. So, this piece is about wrong, and its opposite, right, their origin and whether we need religion to embrace them. To be clear, by religion I mean the process some use to gain practical value from the spirituality of others, not spirituality itself.
There is a claim that without religion, morality is arbitrary and frivolous. Accordingly, absolute morality is often said to exist in the texts of a holy book, of which there are countless throughout human history bearing the same claim with equal fervor. Most are gone now, but one still influences our area especially -- the Bible.
Biblical Scripture, therefore, guides our morality in two ways: either by example, i.e. God, St. John, or by instruction, as in the rules for settling neighborly disputes. Both precepts encourage a type of morality that is, quite frankly, wholly inconsistent with what any rational person would freely adopt if given an objective choice. This is, of course, evidenced simply by reading it. Consider this: without religion, would you remain a good, moral person? The answer is likely yes, and if so, the claim is false, but more importantly, it is unnecessary.
Nevertheless, this claim persists. Which seems to imply that its proponents either have not read their holy book, or do not understand it, and demonstrate an unnerving lack of curiosity toward both its scant justification by history and the questionable intentions of its hundreds of unknown authors, editors and translators who for a thousand years have improved upon, and indeed subtracted from at their leisure, text from the holy anthology. Furthermore, among the most appalling bits of Scripture that encourage rape, slavery, torture and mayhem, we are ensured that those texts are no longer literal and do not apply. But that is precisely the problem -- that each person, as a personal decision, picks and chooses what to believe as literal and what to reject as symbolic. Much the same way atheists accept or reject parts of moral precepts that do or do not make sense to them without having to force each decision into a narrow scope of absolutism.
The point is that no one follows the untenable rules of Scripture anymore, and so morality must come from a place that is separate from religion and is available to everyone. As social animals it seems quite natural to not want to live in a society that encourages murder, rape and thievery, with or without divine surveillance.
Could it be that nature, our genetic heritage, is the precursor for morality? That in centuries past our limited scope of mobility and sphere of interaction forced us to behave for our own survival as a species? Imagine today, cursing a bad driver in the Dallas-Fort Worth area or another person anonymously online. Now imagine that you had to see those people every day and perhaps even count on them for survival. Would you treat them better? Our ancestors did. Perhaps that helps explain why those of us with or without a holy book remain grounded in a system of morality that is widely agreed, yet ever evolving as societies progress. Quite simply -- a system of right and wrong that is not formulated upon an arbitrary decree by a divine source, but from what is inherent within each of us as empathetic individuals. Some of us lag behind the curve, of course, such as those who opposed civil rights or suffrage, but eventually all of us make the curve, and most importantly we make the curve with or without religion.
The gift of empathy is the foundation upon which morality forms, whereby we see in other people, minds and feelings just like our own. It is in how we treat other people that is the stuff of morality. Kindness, charity and generosity are in human nature, and employing these traits needs no justification. Morality exists in the unpretentious free exercise of these traits for the mutual achievement of human joy, not in the binding necessity to appease a system predicated upon threats and fear.
Cole Worley is a resident of Abilene.
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