In a society without religion, who would inculcate the morals of the young?
The State? Absolutely. Because in a society without a God the State will become Absolute. Children will have to learn the morals dictated by the State.
The state does not dictate morality. It is entirely personal.
If the atheist thinks the State is more qualified than religion to transmit morals, upon what authority does the state dictate morals?
Speaking as an atheist, I abhor the thought of anyone dictating to me what my morals should be. I’m pretty much certain that any reasonable person would likewise abhor it. Morality cannot be dictated. You cannot be told what you must think is right or wrong. You might believe that you personally, or you as a group, or you as a state or you as a religion have the right answers to any number of questions regarding morality. But unless you live in a totalitarian state or it’s equivalent, no-one has the right to tell you what to believe.
Consider religion. It invariably contains a prescription of how one should live. Indeed, how one must live if one is to be considered a member of that religion. But it is not compulsory. You are free to decide, whether you were born into that religion or have come to specifically choose it, whether the morality as described by that religion is acceptable to you. To do otherwise, to accept conditions on how one should live ones life, without any thought as to whether those conditions are correct, is to reject one’s own humanity. It would be an insult to all those that have struggled through the ages for the right to self autonomy.
America’s Declaration of Independence, France’s constitution, Paine’s The Rights of Man and the UN Declaration of Human Rights are testaments to the freedom to decide for oneself.
Members of religions (or states or any other group of individuals with a common belief) are, with some exceptions, not mindless drones. They do not blindly follow the relevant dogma. You can choose the right way to live. It’s written into the American and the Australian Constitutions for example.
So the state cannot, in any democratic country with similar constitutions or similar safeguards, dictate morality. And neither can religion. Because you are free, as an individual, to follow, or not, the religion of your choice and to accept, or not, their interpretations of what constitutes morality.
The vast majority of religions actually share the same moral precepts. There is no religion that says you should steal. There is no religion that says you should lie. There is no religion that says you can kill for personal gain. There are exceptions to these ideals but there is a commonality amongst them that is far from being coincidental. They may well be written in various scriptures of various religions but they are not the property of any one of them. Because these moral precepts are universal.
So when it comes down to who should be responsible for teaching morality to one’s children, the answer is obvious: their parents. Whether they be Christian, Muslim, atheist, pagan, Hindu or any other descriptive you’d like to place on them. If the children are lucky, their parents will have taken a good few years and listened to a good number of people before deciding how this world should be treated and how we should act within it.
Some will make mistakes. Some will pass on bad information. Some will fight for a right to dictate their own morality. But we will generally learn from our mistakes and make progress. Not everyone will agree it’s progress, but they will generally be the ones who wanted to dictate the direction themselves in the first instance.
So it ain’t the state, Charles. It ain’t your church. It’s you. You have the responsibility. What you pass on will either make this world a better place in which to live or it won’t. Generally speaking, the good ideas survive, so some of yours will undoubtedly live on. But others will be ultimately rejected. And we both know which ones those are.
. Except for a few radicals here and there.
