the guttermorality case for religion, part 2

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[this started out as a response to comments made to the previous post, but then i figured, why bury it way down there where only, like, two people will see it?  so it became its own post; this way, four people will see it.]



when i posted the first part of this thread the other night, i figured it would be good for a response from each of my two most faithful commenters, and in that i wasn't disappointed.  one, predictably, took the high road, while the other, also predictably, went for the jugular (in the most loving and constructive way possible, of course), but both responded pretty much as i expected they would.

let's start with will:

With a due respect to Mr.Vonnegut, I think Science shoots down a few more -- in fact many more -- things in the bible; virgin birth, walking on water, feeding thousands from enough food to be held in just two hands, and bodies being taken up into the sky. There's lots more also.

you take mr. vonnegut too literally;  the examples he used, i think, were meant to represent the whole of religious mythology.  what i take his quote to mean (and the reason i used it) is that, even if you strip away all the fairy tales, the basic tenets of most faiths hold up remarkably well.

I stand on the side of being an atheist and secular humanist who raised two adopted Korean orphan daughters as a single gay father and saw them turn out to be literate, honest, civic-minded and generous human beings of whom any culture would be proud.

will, one of the things you tend to do when refuting one of my sweeping pronouncements is use yourself as an example of why i'm wrong, as if you are in any way typical of the mass of grubby humanity.  i assure you, you are not.

I do not personally believe that religion is needed to be a moral, principled person.

nor do i, a fact i made clear in the post.  but i do believe that if one lacks either the benefit of a religious upbringing as a basis for one's moral and philosophical grounding or a strong association with those who have, then in order to achieve the secular equivalent, one would have to be either classically educated, or a serious autodidact.  unfortunately, the vast majority of people today are neither of those things.

In fact, given organized religion's track record, I think it isn't a help but a hindrance to that goal.

here, i think you're guilty of the sorta broad-brush stereotyping and bigotry that would horrify you if it were applied by a conservative to, say, transgenders or racial minorities.  i could, for instance, drown you in all kinds of statistics showing that poor religious people donate a far greater portion of their worldly goods to charity than do rich secular humanists, or that people of strong faith tend to lead longer, more satisfying lives than nonbelievers.

i understand the gist of your argument, though.  i started questioning the validity of christianity in early adolescence, about the time my developing critical faculties made it impossible to overlook the contradiction of importuning a god who had preordained everything already.  the final nail in the coffin of my faith was driven the day i half-heartedly tried to explain the whole jesus virgin-birth-and-resurrection thing to an incredulous jewish classmate--the words coming outta my mouth sounded as hollow and stupid to me as they obviously did to her.

and god knows organized religion is in many ways a mess; when you raise men to power over other men in any institution, be it religion or government, corruption of the original idea is inevitable.  but even with all of religion's evils, in no way do i think the world would be better without it.


now, on to noblesavage:

I have always thought it odd that you have this moralistic streak that borders on the puritanical...it just seems so out of place with, well, what you do much of the time.

in case you hadn't noticed, captain obvious, exploring that contradiction is the point of this whole goddam blog (see masthead).

It is also out of synch with your libertarianism. But, then again, you lurch to the right on numerous topics including global warming, so perhaps you are at home with the morality police -- if only they do not get to know you too well.

"morality police"--how the hell did you get that outta what i wrote?  lemme tell you what i believe, noblesavage.  i believe that for any group of people to have any hope of creating and maintaining a free and just society, three things are necessary:  (1) a strong family and community structure, (2) an enlightened, educated populace, and (3) a common, agreed-upon code of conduct.  i further believe that, to the degree a given society has pulled off those three things, relatively little policing, moral or otherwise, is necessary.

america today?  between the sexual revolution, the advent of birth control, the rise of the internet and inflation eliminating the one-income family, we've pretty much decimated (1), the powers-that-be in concert with the teachers' unions have effectively destroyed any hope of (2), and the cults of multiculturalism and political correctness have pretty much dealt the death blow to (3).

you don't believe me?  take off your rose-colored glasses and look around you:  while the 1% systematically steal everything that's not nailed down right under our dumb, oblivious noses, we occupy ourselves with rioting over sneakers, sending our third-graders off to school to orally copulate one another, and dismantling our infrastructure to sell for scrap.

if you can't see how drastically society has deteriorated over the course of your lifetime--i mean, people are routinely doing things today we couldn't have conceived of in our worst nightmares 40 years ago--while at the same time our individual freedoms are being stripped from us daily (in order to "protect" us), then no amount of blathering by yours truly is ever gonna open your eyes to the truth.

Most religious denominations give you a built-in ready to wear moral code. That is true.

which is the whole point of my post.  the moral codes of most of the world's religions (scientology and a few others excepted) weren't randomly whipped up overnight by a cabal of puritanical buzzkillers; on the contrary, they evolved over the millennia as a tried-and-true way to moderate the foibles of human nature, and thus allow people to live together in relative harmony.

without the foundation of a "built-in ready to wear moral code", most people just make it up as they go along, which is pretty much why we are where we are today.

In any case, I don't see you ever going to church, so I guess you just like the idea of it in the abstract...or think it is good for people who need it and you don't need it -- but everyone else does.

i did my time in sunday school, and it served its purpose--it gave me a well-developed conscience, a pretty thorough grounding in the concepts of right and wrong, and an ideal way of living to measure against the way i actually conduct my life.  which is probably one of the reasons i drink.

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that's it--another one in the can.  and now that i've finished extolling the virtues of religion, i'm gonna allow myself a moment to bask in a warm, well-earned glow of godly satisfaction before i get back to my regular business of drunken ranting and tales of random sexual encounters.  you can understand that, right?