How To Have A Moral Code Without Religion

[ailbhe]

I'm mainly thinking of the tweet I've seen forwarded around everywhere - something along the lines of "The Pope says atheists can just pick and choose which morals to have, so today I will choose to frown on the rape of children and think homosexuality is fine."

I seem to have a pretty strict moral code, one way or another. I don't live up to it, of course. I think that if I did it would be a sign to me that it wasn't strict enough.

But when I was four my mother explained to me how fare-evasion on buses was theft, not from the bus company, but from everyone else who used the buses, because their fares all get a little bit larger to make up for the missed fares of non-payers.

She's a bit of a communist hippie type, my mum. A very respectable communist hippie type.

We used to pick up rubbish on our way home from the beach. We composted biodegradable waste, and used non-fatal rat repelling things instead of traps. Off-hand I can think of twice when we gave shelter to desperate people with nowhere to go. We didn't waste things. Two of her children were vegetarian for years until separate and unrelated health issues stopped them. We've all been boycotting Nestlé for about as long as I can remember (she also boycotted Cadburys a bit, not very thoroughly, because they were one of the companies which sacked women on marriage). She gave us books and encouraged us to watch films about race - mainly American ones about black Americans, because that's what we had access to, but in Ireland in the 1980s it wasn't wholly usual.

Of course, I took a lot of this upbringing and brought it to extremes. Local organic this, fair-trade ethically-sourced that, recycled the other.

I think it boils down to the need for good people to not do nothing. I question pretty much everything I do (I am trying very hard not to think about the processes involved in paint manufacture and distribution, though). I try to give my children the space to make their own decisions while letting them know what I think is the right thing to do.

In general I feel like a loony extremist; one thing that has been nice about True Food Co-op and Quakers is that I'm relatively normal there.

Comments

[aquaeri]

I've never quite understood the "you have to have a religion to have a moral code" argument in the first place. I seem to remember ancient Greek philosophers pointing out that we all come with internal moral judgement, so if a god appears in front of us and demands to be worshipped and gives us a moral code that includes child sacrifice, we can judge that moral code to be wrong. Ergo, religion is unncessary, even if one believed god/s were real and the source of religion and morality. (I'm very much of the "religion is obviously a human invention" school myself.)

And as you point out, religions that have engaged in child abuse and rape are currently having a bit of a public relations crisis about being a good source of morality (even if they're sometimes pretending not to notice).

[ailbhe]

I think it's a fear-and-hate-based argument, honestly.

[aquaeri]

Interesting. I know a lot of other religious arguments are fear-and-hate, but it hadn't occurred to me that that one might be. I'll have to think about that.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*nods vigorously* Do you remember some weeks ago when many of the Americans on LJ talking about Huckleberry Finn? One of the key points in that book (the point that resonated with me and made me glad I winced my way through it) was when the titular protagonist decides that he'd rather go to Hell for 'stealing' a slave he's helping run away, than live by the soi-disant Christian precepts he's been taught that deem theft a sin and slaves not human.

That resonated with me as an unhappily Fundamentalist Christian teenager, and resonates with me as an agnostic who spends a lot of time in dialogue with her conscience. For me, no longer being a Christian doesn't mean I get to choose my morality via whims and conveniences; it means I need to practice it according to what I know of humanity and what I can reasonably conclude is the greatest good, rather than according to an outside authority named "Jesus" (or at least what other authorities have told me He says).

Also, I love your mother, sight unseen. *hugs you to transmit to her* *hugs you for yourself*

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

My parents are both environmentalists, so we were brought up to re-use carrier bags, pick up other people's rubbish & recycle long, long before it became "fashionable" We were the werdos doing the weekly shop with our own carrier bags.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

My mum was a Tory, but a Tory who believed that, if you didn't do something about a problem, who did you expect to do it? So she made food for families with a member in hospital, she cleaned up sick at work even though she was "senior management", she picked up litter in the street. And I am just like her, only I'm a commie.

[a-musing-amazon.livejournal.com]

"The Pope says atheists can just pick and choose which morals to have".

I (as can everyone) can pick and choose whether to be a Christian, just as much as I can choose to let my morality be guided by what I consider right. Personally I don't have any gripe with Jesus, even as often strangely reported in the Gospels, but as someone who does have morals I can't stomach the so called 'moral laws' of many who claim to be his followers, e.g. the Pope and many Anglican bishops, so find it hard to accept that so many no doubt decent individuals can sign up to be guided by the such offensive nonsense.

[ailbhe]

Huck Finn shows up periodically - I tend not to notice much. I read it, and Tom Sawyer, but mainly because there wasn't much else around at the time. Um, and there was a hot air balloon. Even as a very small child I would have been in no doubt at all as to where the "sin" actually lay.

My mother and I don't hug much. It's one of the things that got damaged somewhere along the way. I'm trying to reinstate it.

[ailbhe]

We used shop carrier bags and reused them for all sorts of things.

[ailbhe]

My mum didn't realise she was a hippie commie until one of my sisters told her so, well after her 50th birthday. I have no idea how she votes.

[ailbhe]

If it helps any, most of the Roman Catholics I know are appalled by the current pope.

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

Yup, same here :)

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

It's easier to be hypocritical when you're religious; and I mean hypocritical inthe literal sense of the word, "not sufficiently critical of one's own actions as compared to similar actions in others". You've got this bit umbrella cover of Official Goodness(tm) and it's only natural that people let all kinds of inconsistencies & cognitive dissonance slip through.

Any large scale moral system offers the same pitfalls: people in democratic countries tend to be much less sensitive to their own countries' abuses of human rights than to those in other places. That sort of thing.

The thing about atheism (or for me, more precisely, Existentialism) is that you don't have anyone to give you cover for your every day choices. You can't be a "good" atheist, which means each individual action is up for examination for its goodness on its own terms.

So in that sense yes, atheists "can" pick and choose their morals; what makes them more moral than religious people, however, is that they *have* to.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Who's currently urging doctors to deny women abortions, apparently. Except when the women involved are nuns who've been raped by priests, one assumes.

That guy sends shivers of mixed fear, rage and disgust all up and down my spine.