One sore subject that comes up in the dialogue between Christians and atheists is the idea that atheists have no morals. Let me make this very clear from the beginning:
BEING ATHEIST/AGNOSTIC/FREETHINKING DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU HAVE NO MORALS.
I want to be clear on that.
The difference, I think, is that Christianity has one sense of what is moral and what isn’t and we get really irritated when others don’t conform to it. Purity is a virtue which is why we frown on adultery, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, and pr0n. If I was judging atheists by those I knew in college or who I read online, this would be a bit questionable (i.e. Jen McCreight’s post on the Dan Savage pr0nfest in Seattle and her comments from the AHA gathering in Boston). However, I know that she isn’t representative of all atheists and she and I also would agree to disagree on that. (At least… I think she would.)
I think that there is a set of morals that all of us (believers and non-believers) can agree to:
-no cheating
-no murder
-no stealing
-no adultery
-fair wage for a day’s work
-help others who need it
-Golden Rule: do unto others as they would do to you
Having said that, there exists the question of atheists/agnostics not having a chance against Christians when running for office. I think I’ve addressed this before but I think it is unfair and that the Christian generally has the upper hand because they’re a known quantity (in theory) and they’re expected to uphold a certain moral standard. On the other hand, I really have a problem with those who run for school board elections that make their faith/philosophy into an agenda, be it Christians wanting to put God back in the schools or atheists who want to secularize things. I have no problem with secularization and evolution being taught in science classes — I have a problem with it when it is taken to an extreme.
This is kind of a lukewarm post based on my last ones but the issue of atheists having morals isn’t a hard one: they do — they just may differ from ours. Again, I’d love to have feedback on this.
First off, thanks for stating the blindingly obvious. I genuinely mean that: I’ve read all too many blogs and forum posts which say that morality without religion is impossible, so thanks for being reasonable.
Now we can start to disagree 😛
I’m not really sure what the point of “purity” is, ethically speaking. Let’s look at the most socially acceptable “sin” from the list you give: pre-marital sex. Not only do I think it’s not unethical, I think it’s a downright good idea. If you are going to be in a serious romantic relationship with someone, then you really need to be compatible sexually, and if you wait until marriage then you are leaving a huge part of the relationship unexplored, potentially disasterously.
It’s not a coincidence that the divorce rate is higher amongst younger more religious people: the kids are told to remain chaste – something that goes completely against their hormonal and emotional urges – so they do the logical thing for them to resolve the situation they find themselves in: they get married to the first person they slap thier lips on, and they do it fast. That really isn’t a good basis for a steady relationship.
Adultery: I’d be against it personally, since I am monogamous, but I don’t find anything ethically wrong in couples who aren’t sleeping around. It is however tragic when this results in emotional pain, which is all too easy given the complexities of the issue.
Porn: this is probably the most ethically murky of the list, but I’d say there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but as with adultery it’s extremely easy for it to become problematic.
Homosexuality. I cannot for the life of me think of a single reason to be against homosexuality in any regard. Even if you want to take it to it’s logical conclusion by saying “what about the kids?” – every study that I’ve seen that hasn’t come out of some kind of conservative/religious thinktank has come up with the results which tell us kids raised by gay parents are completely normal and well-adjusted.
As for rules we can all agree on: I don’t. I don’t think that rules are a good basis for morals.
Whilst I’m not neccesarily a moral relativist, I am someone who subscribes to situational ethics: an easy example is the “no lying” rule. There are really obvious situations where’s it’s a much more ethical action to lie than to tell the truth, and I’m sure there are situations where all these rules can be broken ethically. Can’t think of a way to oppose “fair wage for a days work” though.
Atheists getting elected: I live in the UK, and we’ve had atheist Prime Ministers in the past – and a long time ago too (comes with having less everyday emphasis on religion and having had an electoraly successful socialist party), so I can’t really comment on the USA too expertly.
However, I will say a word for secularism: secularism is the compromise between state religion and state atheism. It isn’t one side of the extreme, it’s the middle ground. I think everyone should be against state-imposed atheism just as much as a state-imposed religion, but secularism is infact the government-mandated neutrality regarding religion. It means everyone can think as they wish to think. However, in a society which has the rule of law, not everyone can act as they wish to act, and this applies to secularism as well: so if your religion demands that you rip out the still-beating heart of your sacrifice on top of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, then it doesn’t matter: you can’t do it.
Good post, though 🙂
I’m glad that you so easily come to the right conclusion here.
I do have to say that identifying oneself by a broad religious label has never been a good guide to moral or political beliefs. So, while atheists might not have a single, widespread view on what the best guide to ethics is, that charge can equally be lain at the feet of any religious group that is large enough and tolerant enough to contain differences of opinion. Christians who agree on the Bible as a good moral guide can still disagree on what moral framework gets abstracted from the scripture, for example. Not just a matter of interpretation of individual issues, but also a matter of taking the diverse sources of advice found in the various books and integrating them into one big picture. There are too many nuances to just be covered under one set of labels. There’s no substitute for actually doing one’s homework about candidates.
So this is part of my problem about “Christian” being used as a synonym for “moral”. It’s certainly not the case that that word is used to refer to the exact same moral philosophy every time. Nor would most atheists concede that religious morality is somehow more objective, in part because there’s no obvious way to settle disputes between different religious groups objectively, and in part because justifying a moral decision based on something that doesn’t exist would not be valid reasoning. In the metaphysical sense, it is possible that a religious morality might be objective. But this doesn’t mean that there is an objective way to use religion to settle moral questions in this world.
Of course, this is where secularism comes in, and the insistence that public policy be based on concerns that we can all verify exist, rather than on other things, e.g. personal faith or private revelations. There’s an unfortunate tendency nowadays to equate secularism with atheism. I don’t know whether that was started by critics on the religious right, or by people in pro-secular groups that looked around and found that most of them weren’t believers. But it’s kind of a red herring, since secularism is by definition a position advocating neutrality.
Not that this settles the moral conflict. But, there are deeper sorts of problem with values like purity.
Most importantly, it’s not clear that this is a “universal” sort of principle. I mean, people from different religions can agree on certain standards about what it means to help or to hurt others, and what kinds of things to consider when deciding whether something is fair. It’s not too confusing to see that a loving God might like to lay down those sorts of rules or guidelines, because those are the kinds of idea that allow us to promote each other’s well-being or happiness, to live peacefully, to express love and kindness, and so on.
But they can’t really agree on what this “purity” thing means. We can talk about purity of substances, or whether your drinking water has dangerous pathogens in it, but that’s not what people mean when they talk about “spiritual” or “moral” purity (at best it’s just an analogy). In what meaningful sense do pre-marital sex or homosexuality damage one’s “purity”? Is there a reason to believe in this sort of moral value outside of just saying “well, God says…”? Is there a clear reason for God to say these things (or do we just shrug and suppose that he’s probably got a good reason)?
And to make the point that this is not just an atheist question; what about the other versions of “purity”? One can look through the Mosaic code and find lots of stuff about cleanliness and uncleanliness that is largely ignored by modern Christians. To most people, the distinction between the cleanliness of pork and chicken, or between the cleanliness inherent to giving birth to a daughter versus giving birth to a son, that seems pretty arbitrary. To many of us, the distinction between the “purity” of a gay relationship and the “purity” of a straight relationship seems equally arbitrary.
So, while certain rules like “don’t commit adultery” seem good, insofar as they protect people and relationship, atheists generally draw a blank on many of the other “purity” prohibitions. It feels just like it would to be criticized by a Muslim who insists that women should wear the burka and no one should eat pork; why on earth should we agree?
It’s even worse when some Christian groups try to back up such prohibitions with justifications that seem to be made up. For example, I’ve heard quite a few times that being gay is bad for one’s health. This isn’t even true for lesbians, or for most gay men nowadays (the HIV epidemic is not to be taken lightly, but it’s substantially better controlled now, partly because gay men are being treated less and less as part of a fringe sexual subculture). I also hear that same-sex couples make worse parents, frequently based on stereotypes or on studies done on single parents. These sorts of tactic smell like desperation, like they’re trying not to admit that there’s simply no other reason than “God said so”, and so if you don’t believe that, there’s no reason to worry about such things at all.
Which, frankly, is exactly what I think. So while I understand why Christians are concerned about various types of sexual purity, I don’t recognize this as a valuable way of thinking about morality at all. More than that, I actually think that this is pretty insidious and problematic reasoning, and so I don’t feel any pressure to concede to judgments people make using it.