Moral Imperatives without God?

[Charlemagne_II]

Why should there be moral imperatives without God?

“It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule extends with more or less force to every specie of free government. Who that is sincere friend to it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric? … Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that Morality can be maintained without Religion.” George Washington

Washington is clearly referring to the advance of atheism during the French Revolution, but may also be warning of that advance to American shores with such writers as Thomas Paine who spent himself scoffing at and undermining the moral authority of the Christian religion.

Since the world has never been without religion, it would be purely speculative as to how a new system of morality could be created

Thought experiment:

If all religion was to perish all at once as the result of a war against religion, what would be the moral foundations upon which to build a morality that would be commonly acceptable to all … at least to the degree that Christianity once prevailed?

 

[JP2Admirer]

I think that the presupposition that religion is the basis of morality is over-extended here. Nature is the basis of morality – true religion simply provides the proper conclusions to the precepts of the natural law. It is true that nature is given by the divine law-giver.

I think a more proper thought experiment would be to imagine a world without God, and then see where moral imperatives come from.

Although, sociologically speaking, I think the place of religion in morality is indispensible.

One of the things that continually draws me to Christ is that He so simply – for the simple and profoundly for the intellectually gifted – summed up the way to live virtuously. I guess being God has its benefits.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

I think that the presupposition that religion is the basis of morality is over-extended here. Nature is the basis of morality – true religion simply provides the proper conclusions to the precepts of the natural law. It is true that nature is given by the divine law-giver.

Then what you are saying is that the natural law precedes religion. I agree. Natural law morality is put into us by God. But if you remove God from the equation, how can the atheist appeal to natural law without appealing to the giver of natural law? In other words, what is his source of authority for natural law? My own experience increasingly is that atheists don’t even like natural law morality.

 

[ManOnFire]

My wife and I were just wondering the same question.

Without religion, the young and the unthinkers will be influenced into believing whatever the pop culture media says, without a moral compass, herd mentality style. It’s already happening. Look how many people have already abandoned Truth in favor of feelings…Look at the nuveau labels of “don’t be a hater” at anyone who points out the truth even though it might be negative and important, as if instead giving in to the child inside should become the number one priority. Freedom in a nation of soft, selfish children will never survive long term… Sooner or later, it will require a dictator to force people to behave. Then people will wonder where the freedom went.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

ManOnFire

*Freedom in a nation of soft, selfish children will never survive long term… Sooner or later, it will require a dictator to force people to behave. Then people will wonder where the freedom went. *

The world saw something like that scenario at the time of the French Revolution, when France disintegrated with a lust for freedoms of every ilk. It took a dictator like Napoleon to restore some semblance of political order after the moral anarchy unleashed by the Revolution.

In modern times, I’m afraid, the Dictator is more subtle and insidious. I’m speaking of the Dictatorship of the Left Wing Media and Academia, and more than anything else, what Pope Benedict has called the “dictatorship of moral relativism.”

There is only one institution left in society to oppose it … the Catholic Church. Name another, if you can.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

According to the French atheist Sartre:

*“You are free, therefore choose – that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do.” *

If there is no pre-existing rule of general morality, how can there ever be a general rule of morality, since everyone will choose (invent) his own rule?

A prescription for moral anarchy and the total collapse of legal jurisdiction over any action.

 

[JP2Admirer]

I think that the presupposition that religion is the basis of morality is over-extended here. Nature is the basis of morality – true religion simply provides the proper conclusions to the precepts of the natural law. It is true that nature is given by the divine law-giver.

Then what you are saying is that the natural law precedes religion. I agree. Natural law morality is put into us by God. But if you remove God from the equation, how can the atheist appeal to natural law without appealing to the giver of natural law? In other words, what is his source of authority for natural law? My own experience increasingly is that atheists don’t even like natural law morality.

I agree with you Charlemagne…that’s why I said we ought to make the thought experiment about the existence of God or not. It is true, the good atheistic thinkers seek to abolish nature altogether because if there is a natural law, then something is directing our actions – that something almost always rounds itself out in God.

So, I would pose the question like this – If you believe there are moral imperatives, what is their source? To uphold moral imperatives, in my mind, to be logically coherent one must posit some kind of a natural law with a rational law giver.

Maybe it becomes and either/or…either there are moral imperatives and there is a law giver, or, there are not moral imperatives and there is no God.

If there are any atheists reading this, I’d be interested to hear how you view this. Perhaps there is an argument that can uphold the natural law and eschew a law giver. I don’t know what that argument might look like…but perhaps someone else does.

 

[JP2Admirer]

My wife and I were just wondering the same question.

Without religion, the young and the unthinkers will be influenced into believing whatever the pop culture media says, without a moral compass, herd mentality style. It’s already happening. Look how many people have already abandoned Truth in favor of feelings…Look at the nuveau labels of “don’t be a hater” at anyone who points out the truth even though it might be negative and important, as if instead giving in to the child inside should become the number one priority. Freedom in a nation of soft, selfish children will never survive long term… Sooner or later, it will require a dictator to force people to behave. Then people will wonder where the freedom went.

Have you ever read Plato’s Republic? Because you sound a lot like him in the later books.

When the desiring element in society, that seeks only to satisfy it’s lusts, takes control of the reasoning element, you have a recipe for tyranny. Oligarchy (love of money) gives over to tyranny because a “man of the people” (tyrant who is a slave to his lower desires) comes along to ‘liberate’ the people by giving them over to their own lusts.

As for the “herd mentality”, welcome to the human race. That’s the beauty of true religion (i.e. Catholic) – we can be herd members but still have open eyes to the truth. Being part of this herd, this kind of sheep, opens the eyes to the eternal. Not so with those shepherded by the wolves. Otherwise, we are slaves to the latest whim of a culture swept away by its own ‘childish’ desires – or as Augustine put it – the ‘torrents of custom.’

 

[Charlemagne_II]

JP

As for the “herd mentality”, welcome to the human race.

Good insight there. We cannot avoid being in one herd or the other. The common complaint lodged by atheists is that Catholics have a flock mentality. So true. Either we follow Christ, or we follow Satan. The atheist, whether he acknowledges it or not, must make the same choice.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723 – 1789), heir to a fabulous fortune, was most famous for his attacks on religion in his System of Nature (1770). Both a materialist and an atheist, he sought to prove that the universe is self-sustaining and needs no creator. As for Christian morality, in *Christianity Unveiled *he seems to anticipate the Marquis de Sade: “It would be useless and almost unjust to insist upon a man’s being virtuous if he cannot be so without being unhappy. So long as vice renders him happy, he should love vice.” Voltaire commented: “This book leads to an atheistic philosophy that I detest."

 

[edwest2]

When the god Change becomes the object of worship, we simply have Modernism, which past Popes have written about in detail. Everything must change. Man is in charge. “Man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras, 5th Century B.C.

Within each of us is a deadly flaw called sin, but even those who have never heard of Christ have the possibility of salvation if they follow the law that is written on their hearts.

For some, the Truth as taught by the Church is offensive or repressive or both. We must be free! Indeed, God will not force you to love Him.

To my fellow Catholics. Please be careful of what you watch, hear and read. The devil repackages sin over and over again to make it seem new. “Look! We have a new idea!”
Put your time into those things which have some virtue.

From George Washington’s Farewell Address:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

Peace,
Ed

 

[Tonitz]

“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith … we need believing people.”
~ Adolf Hitler

Religion as such is no safeguard, as shown above. And Washington and his contemporaries owned slaves and held women in a position we would not today tolerate. This country was founded far more on commercial than on religious interests, despite the Puritans from whom whom inherit our public duplicity in matters of morals. And whatever claims we make to being a Christian Nation, those are easily belied by our commercial policies and actions as we see daily and in detail in the news.

If there is an actual basis for morality, with or without God, it may lie in the idea of sameness. That sameness is embodied in the several versions of the Golden Rule which predates Christianity by some span of time. Of course it is made specific to our faith in second part of The Great Commandment. That part’s contingency on the first is practical, whether one takes the first into consideration as faith in fact or in a higher ideal. For non dualists the entirety simply reads as and expression of unity as a fundamental fact.

But this, in final logical analysis, is what it comes down to at any level, and in any system, spiritual, social, economic, or whatever: survival. And I speak here not of the mere act of maintaining existence, but inclusive of prospering and all that goes with that in everything from financial through creative to emotional factors. It has to do with survival because the wages of adversarialism of any form is death. That is why Satan is called the adversary, and that is why our own adversarial economic system is now in its plutocratic throes of spiraling downward as every public indicator of the common weal is declining-- from longevity to general happiness to economic and scholastic factors.

But if one knew in their gut, or at least in their deep conviction, that what appears as the other IS in essence the same as ourselves, whether we attribute that to sonship or to genetics, and knew that sameness as our prime value, it would become impossible to harm someone and greatly possible to work in concert with even the strangest stranger of like heart/mind.

In the mean time here are some more interesting statements, one from a President equal to Washington, about religion in general. I put them here not because of any concerns about those of my own faith, though there may be some cause there, but because faith taken together as a phenomenon has some dynamics which rightfully are of concern and are worthy of solution:

“Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion, several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.”
~ Mark Twain

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”
~ Susan B. Anthony

“The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.”
~ Denis Diderot

“The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.”
~ Abraham Lincoln

“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
~ Albert Einstein

“On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.”
~Barry Goldwater

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Tonitz

Below are some quotes you cited above:

“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith … we need believing people.”
~ Adolf Hitler

*“Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion, several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.”
~ Mark Twain

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”
~ Susan B. Anthony

“The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.”
~ Denis Diderot

“The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.”
~ Abraham Lincoln

“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
~ Albert Einstein*

You identify yourself as a Catholic. Why do you present these quotes without comment or rebuttal? It almost seems as if these quotes would be offered by an atheist, rather than a Catholic, especially since you decline to reply to them.

For example, as to the quote from Hitler, you might have pointed out that the first things the Nazis demanded was the the crucifix be removed from all classrooms, and that all Catholic youth groups were to be replaced by Hitler’s Youth Clubs.

You might have said, with respect to the quote from Diderot, that many a Nazi and Communist philosopher has been glad to kill thousands of priests in Germany and Russia, not to mention a number of priests who were executed by the French Revolution, which the philosopher Diderot certainly helped to make possible.

As to the quote from Lincoln you might have paired it with a remark Lincoln made in 1846:

“That I am not a member of any Christian Church is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.”

I could go on with the other quotes, but what is the point? You seem determined to be a propagandist for any literature that slams Christianity. I expect to see this pattern of yours repeated in future posts, and will be following your strategy with great interest.

 

[tonyrey]

I think that the presupposition that religion is the basis of morality is over-extended here. Nature is the basis of morality – true religion simply provides the proper conclusions to the precepts of the natural law. It is true that nature is given by the divine law-giver.

The only natural law** nature** provides is the law of the jungle!

 

[JDaniel]

I agree with you Charlemagne…that’s why I said we ought to make the thought experiment about the existence of God or not. It is true, the good atheistic thinkers seek to abolish nature altogether because if there is a natural law, then something is directing our actions – that something almost always rounds itself out in God.

So, I would pose the question like this – If you believe there are moral imperatives, what is their source? To uphold moral imperatives, in my mind, to be logically coherent one must posit some kind of a natural law with a rational law giver.

Maybe it becomes and either/or…either there are moral imperatives and there is a law giver, or, there are not moral imperatives and there is no God.

If there are any atheists reading this, I’d be interested to hear how you view this. Perhaps there is an argument that can uphold the natural law and eschew a law giver. I don’t know what that argument might look like…but perhaps someone else does.

The problem, J2PA, is one that you should be all too familiar with. Whenever an agent (X) acts such that it repeatedly produces that same effect (Y), are we not justified in concluding that the agent is determined to produce Y? For if X were indifferent when acting - and therefore not determined to produce Y - there would be no sufficient reason why Y, rather than something else completely different, should repeatedly follow from X’s actions. Indeed, anything could follow from the action of an agent if that agent were not ordered or determined to produce this effect rather than that.

If it is our nature to produce a system of morality, for example, whenever people form a society, then we are determined by something other than ourselves to do that. The atheist might say that it is simply the effect of the group upon each of us. Or, he might say that it is the effect of self-preservation on each of us. But, in either case, are groups and self-preservation needs efficacious? Does not the tendency towards morality pre-exist the group? Does the need for self-preservation repeatedly produce the same effect?

God bless,
jd

 

[JDaniel]

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723 – 1789), heir to a fabulous fortune, was most famous for his attacks on religion in his System of Nature (1770). Both a materialist and an atheist, he sought to prove that the universe is self-sustaining and needs no creator. As for Christian morality, in *Christianity Unveiled *he seems to anticipate the Marquis de Sade: “It would be useless and almost unjust to insist upon a man’s being virtuous if he cannot be so without being unhappy. So long as vice renders him happy, he should love vice.” Voltaire commented: “This book leads to an atheistic philosophy that I detest."

That’s precisely the problem: where is the proof that virtue makes a man unhappy? On the contrary, from my own nearly 50 years of empirical study of men and women, the more virtuous they are the happier they are. I can’t cite a study, but, I firmly believe this to be generally true.

God bless,
jd

 

[Tonitz]

Happiness, I feel, stems form belonging, which is an aspect of identity, or sameness in essence, the perversion of which is the kind of ownership which imbues objects with the power of granting happiness. The capitalistic “This belongs to me” is the practical antithesis of feeling happiness by identity in a way similar to the communistic “This belongs to everyone so you can’t have it.” This is why true happiness is often associated with accomplishment (being at one with an experience) or with belonging to a family, having friends, or union with God.

So while it is unlikely that virtue makes one unhappy, by feeling part of a greater good through action that promotes that good, or virtue, one certainly can be happy. This can be true even if that happiness has a cost associated with it.

Relative to atheism, then, while we as believers feel that the cause and end of our virtue is God, the atheist can yet feel the benefits of virtue, or happiness, within the paradigm of their vision. And sorry to say, I have seen such atheistic paradigms that were larger and more genuinely virtuous than the narrowly dogmatized rote religion of many. Religion by itself is not necessarily the source or refuge for virtue. Imo, one must go beyond mere religion.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Tonitz

*Religion by itself is not necessarily the source or refuge for virtue. Imo, one must go beyond mere religion. *

Apparently you disagree with Jesus? You think more like an atheist than a Catholic?

“Everyone who acknowledges me before others I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father. But whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my heavenly Father.” Matthew 10:32-33

“He who believes and is baptized will be saved; he who does not believe will be condemned.” Mark 16:16

 

[Tonitz]

Why would I disagree with Jesus???

Many Catholics insist on the efficacy of their belief as an agent in dealing with the non belief of the other 2/3 of the world and even their fellow Christians of different mind in the same way a some people often seem to think that the other person has the same set of premises, perceptions, values, and experiences they do. In other words, they appear to require that the world is made in their own image and likeness and conforms to their interpretation of the group paradigm they hold. Is that useful in other than a self verifying way?

but if you are right, and everyone else is wrong, where do you go to to have some common ground? Do you simply advance the history of your belief, which is highly suspect in the eyes of many, or do you go to something that isn’t clearly a matter of faith and thereby try to establish some form of communication?

I’m quite convinced that more conversions have been lost by third party religious references than many sticks can be shaken at. To someone who doesn’t believe in Jesus, it matters not a whit that He is the Son of God. If it did, He wouldn’t have been crucified. But we crucify Him again and again by using Him as a weapon of intellectual assertion in so many cases.

Ant that is what I mean by mere religion and going beyond it. Is it not obvious that there are far fewer believers by actual conviction than by habit? And while the routine of devotion and worship can bring one to the doorstep of spirituality, it is a darn sight more work to live up to the lives of the Saints. Isn’t the news full of religious people who act in anything but a Christian way, giving ammunition to the anti-religious?

All your quotes are useful to those who are already in agreement. And they may have some value in piquing curiosity in someone who already has a mind to be interested. But if one insists that by themselves such quotes ought to have the power of converting heathens or even non Catholic Christians, it would be worth considering that there may be other factors involved.

So I’m not disagreeing by any means. That would be foolish. But all men and women are created in His image and likeness. So whether they attribute correctly in our eyes or not, they may yet be virtuous and enjoy to their capacity the benefits of those virtues. So why not start out from the premise of shared sonship as distinct from the usually innocent error of their ways. I mean, what chance would you have, Charlemagne, of being such a staunch believer if you were born in Iran, India, or China? Maybe you might be one of the few who receive such grace, but that is not the lot of most. Even after 2K years of effort, only 1/3 of the world is even Christian.

And I’d like to read what your application of Mark 16:16 is to that statistic. That’s quite a dynamic there if all those folks are ending up in hell along with everyone non Catholic from 2K years ago and from human history before that. What’s the point of making such simplistic assertions?

So the quotes you cite are very useful for the choir, and may be used as motivation, but even the Church lays down many circumstances where the kind of Baptism you seem to advocate here is not the sole way to salvation. And in Matthew’s lines here denial would seem to imply knowledge such as Peter’s. And look how he ended up! I just keep thinking about that admonition in sales that stems from a Biblical reference: “More sales are killed by the jawbone of an ***…”

 

[Betterave]

Happiness, I feel, stems form belonging, which is an aspect of identity, or sameness in essence, the perversion of which is the kind of ownership which imbues objects with the power of granting happiness. The capitalistic “This belongs to me” is the practical antithesis of feeling happiness by identity in a way similar to the communistic “This belongs to everyone so you can’t have it.” This is why true happiness is often associated with accomplishment (being at one with an experience) or with belonging to a family, having friends, or union with God.

So while it is unlikely that virtue makes one unhappy, by feeling part of a greater good through action that promotes that good, or virtue, one certainly can be happy. This can be true even if that happiness has a cost associated with it.

Relative to atheism, then, while we as believers feel that the cause and end of our virtue is God, the atheist can yet feel the benefits of virtue, or happiness, within the paradigm of their vision. And sorry to say, I have seen such atheistic paradigms that were larger and more genuinely virtuous than the narrowly dogmatized rote religion of many. Religion by itself is not necessarily the source or refuge for virtue. Imo, one must go beyond mere religion.

“Mere religion”? Vs. “false religion”? What about “mere philosophy”? Must we go beyond that to, IYO? What are we headed for in this “going beyond” (whichever one(s) you advocate)? (Barry Goldwater? )