Upchurch
Papa Funkosophy
Being the good Unitarians that we are, my wife and I are finally starting to get back into the habit of going to church on a semi-regular basis.
Yesterday's <strike>philosophy lecture</strike> sermon was about the sources of our morality and was entitled something along the lines of "Do we need God to be moral?" This is only about the hundredth time that I wished I had a transcript of one of these sermons to share with you folks. The arguments she presented were wonderfully constructed and supported and there is no way I'm going to do them justice, not with my memory.
Anyway, I'll try my best to outline the main points:
1. Statistically, regular church goers, or people who belong to a religious community, are more likely to give a larger portion of their income to charity and/or to volunteer their time.
2. Believers in God attribute religion and belief in God as the source of this moral obligation to help those less fortunate.
3. Various moral philosophers (I'm sorry, I can't remember the names) attribute morality to one's social group and that the tighter knit that group is, the more tightly those moral beliefs are clung to. In other words, people are moral in order to conform to the norms of their society rather than out of a belief in God.
4. Her conclusion was that morality originates from society rather than strictly from God. However, because religious groups like churches tend to be tighter knit and have higher standards for its members, religious people tend to be more moral than non-religious people, who lack that level of peer pressure.
It used to be that when people asked my religion, I would jokingly say, "Boy Scout." And I was half-serious because the Boy Scouts taught me more about right and wrong and helping others than religion ever did. In light of the above, it turns out that I may have been more correct than I knew.
On an aside: She had an interesting take on the "put God back in our government/schools" people. While all of the founding fathers were religious and many of them were Christian, they formed the government to be impartial to religion. Putting the ten commandments up in a court room or in a classroom doesn't make the people there more moral, it is an attempt by Christians to tell those who came later whose country this really is. It is not the religious dogma or icons that encourage morality, it is the atmosphere and beliefs of the society that do so.
Anyway, now that I've thuroughly butchered a wonderful set of arguments, I'll leave it alone to refine in future posts.
Yesterday's <strike>philosophy lecture</strike> sermon was about the sources of our morality and was entitled something along the lines of "Do we need God to be moral?" This is only about the hundredth time that I wished I had a transcript of one of these sermons to share with you folks. The arguments she presented were wonderfully constructed and supported and there is no way I'm going to do them justice, not with my memory.
Anyway, I'll try my best to outline the main points:
1. Statistically, regular church goers, or people who belong to a religious community, are more likely to give a larger portion of their income to charity and/or to volunteer their time.
2. Believers in God attribute religion and belief in God as the source of this moral obligation to help those less fortunate.
3. Various moral philosophers (I'm sorry, I can't remember the names) attribute morality to one's social group and that the tighter knit that group is, the more tightly those moral beliefs are clung to. In other words, people are moral in order to conform to the norms of their society rather than out of a belief in God.
4. Her conclusion was that morality originates from society rather than strictly from God. However, because religious groups like churches tend to be tighter knit and have higher standards for its members, religious people tend to be more moral than non-religious people, who lack that level of peer pressure.
It used to be that when people asked my religion, I would jokingly say, "Boy Scout." And I was half-serious because the Boy Scouts taught me more about right and wrong and helping others than religion ever did. In light of the above, it turns out that I may have been more correct than I knew.
On an aside: She had an interesting take on the "put God back in our government/schools" people. While all of the founding fathers were religious and many of them were Christian, they formed the government to be impartial to religion. Putting the ten commandments up in a court room or in a classroom doesn't make the people there more moral, it is an attempt by Christians to tell those who came later whose country this really is. It is not the religious dogma or icons that encourage morality, it is the atmosphere and beliefs of the society that do so.
Anyway, now that I've thuroughly butchered a wonderful set of arguments, I'll leave it alone to refine in future posts.
