Because it adds something that doesn’t need to be there, unless you are taught that it needs to be there. I can’t remember where this quote came from, it was probably dawkins again, but there is a quote that it doesn’t take religion for a good man to do good things, and a bad man will be bad either way, but to make a good man do bad things you have to use religion. I don’t necessarily believe this, but it does point to a problem. I think good people can be good without religion, and even if 99.99999% of religious people are good, there will always be that 0.00001% that use it as a way to do bad things. I know that it is unlikely that I will ever even meet someone who falls into this catagory, but I just believe that if it makes no difference on a personal level to believe or not believe, then I would rather just avoid the whole thing. I must state though to anyone reading this, that i am refering to all religions that ever existed, not specifically the christian religion. Just as an example, there is a popular quote from Mahatma Gandhi that kind of speaks to this idea. He said “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ” which speaks to the idea that some people use religion as a type of shield so that they can do whatever they want and just say there religion told them to do it.
I think the Christian philosopher would tell you that, without religion, how can you ever form a coherent definition of what is “good” and “bad”? What would be the basis for one’s moral judgments about people ought to be behave, and ought not to behave?
I think that most atheists are non-nihilistic in the sense that they do have values and ideals. Bill Maher, for instance, is said to be involved in the PETA movement (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).
What I sense is that some form of “loose belief” is probably a good thing, in terms of grounding humanistic values. John Lennon believed in love, in peace on earth. He perhaps didn’t know
why he believed it; he just did, it was self-evident to him.
Buddhists, as I understand them, tend to believe that kindness and compassion are not a result of what you do believe, but of what you
don’t believe.
I can see some evidence for that. For example, the Epicurus was amoral. He did not believe that there was any such thing as morality, in a transcendent sense. To a large extent, he believe in
nothing. But
because he believed in nothing, he had no particular reason not to admit women or slaves to his school, because he didn’t
believe that women were inferior to men, nor did he believe that social hierarchy had any divine purpose.
Plato, who seemingly prided himself on his moral rigor, neither admitted women nor slaves to his school, in respect of “moral decency.” He
believed that women and men were of a different nature, and that it was the nature of men to rule and of women to be subordinate. He
believed that social hierarchies were not only by nature, but – perhaps – a product of divine will.
The Hindu caste system was another case of moral and religious belief having anti-humanistic implications. For many Hindus, it was divinely ordained that the Untouchable class exist. Epicurus, for his part, would not have believed in such a thing as an Untouchable caste; the evidence of his own eyes would have told him that people are people. Because he didn’t have any particular beliefs, he saw people clearly.
One final example is non-Nazism, which was distinguished not by what it
didn’t believe, but by what it
did believe – the doctrine of the master race; the doctrine of the inferiority of the Jews; the doctrines of a hierarchy of races.
Today, many non-believers – who nonetheless have “soft” ideals of human solidarity – cannot understand why women should not have full equality with men, or why a minority of homosexuals should bother than any more than a minority of left-handed individuals, or albinos. Their openness is based on what they do
not believe, nor is it inhibited by what they do believe.
