16/11/2016 0 Comments Morality & ReligionWhere would we get our morality from if it were not for religion? This is a question that is often posed by the faithful in any discussion or debate involving religion. To me, the question is one of the finest examples of utter fatuousness masquerading as immense profundity. And, I shall argue my case in the following paragraphs as to why I think that religion assigns too much credit to itself about virtues that are not attributable to it in reality. Human morality is exclusive of religion, always has been and always will be. But, before that, it is important to understand from where religion gets the self-appointed authority to assign to itself the role of the giver of human morality. It comes from presupposing that religion has God on its side. Even if for a moment we concede that this could be a true claim, it throws up two very distinct problems. One, there is no way of either proving or disproving that a God or Gods exist. Two, there is no way of proving that God, if he/they exist, is/are actually bothered about concurring with what human beings presuppose. Therefore, when the basis of a claim is suspect and cannot be supported by evidence that rises above the level of empty dogmas, leave alone be proven conclusively, the entire premise of the case falls apart. When organised religion came into being in the human society about 5000 years ago, in India and Egypt, the exponents of religion realised this flaw. Therefore, a very clever instrument was devised to eliminate all doubts regarding the authority of religion to act on behalf of God on earth. It was by declaring that scriptures were dictated by God to humans and could not be questioned. Not just that, the declaration arrived with riders. Any attempt to question the authenticity of either the origin or the content of the holy writ would be punishable by an eternity in Hades once the party on earth got over. Unquestioning compliance, on the other hand, would earn eternal bliss in Heaven. Punishments for heresy became even more dangerously pronounced with the advent of the Abrahamic religions. Curiously, in all of these 5000 odd years, nobody has ever returned to report from either of these two destinations, heaven or hell. It must be said that no other case in human history has continued to claim a winning argument on the basis of zero evidence as religion has. In fact, there is absolutely nothing in any of the holy books that could not have been written by the people who lived in the age in which those books were “revealed”. The greatest pointer to the fact that all these books and scriptures are of human authorship is the fact that they contain statements about the earth and the universe that was common knowledge at that point of time – the Ptolemaic universe - but have been proven wrong in the subsequent centuries. Therefore, we have to either conclude that the holy books were indeed written by men, or the concept of God as an omniscient being is erroneous. I leave it to the believers to choose which. Interestingly, even in this age of enlightenment, we are witnessing the birth of a new religion – Mormonism. So, the preying continues unabated! Religion bases its authority on these dubious scriptures and yet, makes tall claims for itself, including on the issue of morality. It is an utterly false theory that ceasing to believe is ceasing to behave. Having stated this, the first thing we must realise is that morality is innate in us. It has not been planted in us by a celestial super-being, of whom religion claims to be the earthly agent. Morality has developed in us by the process of evolution, the same mechanism by which all species on earth have evolved. The only reason for morality in us is human solidarity and indeed the solidarity with fellow members of the animal kingdom. If we did not have solidarity, we would not have evolved thus far as a species. The divisiveness of religion acts in contrast to this solidarity. To argue my case, I would like to draw upon something that neurologist Dr Sam Harris mentioned in his TED lecture on science and morality. Why is it that we, human beings, have no qualms about spraying insecticide from an aerosol canister and killing cockroaches en-masse and yet are gravely affected when a fellow human being is killed? At the same time, we are more perturbed by the death of a fellow mammalian, say for example a cow, than we are by that of a garden lizard; but the sorrow would be substantially less than what would befall us occasioned by the death of a fellow human being. The reason for this, besides the obvious aspect of solidarity with our fellow beings, lies in the sense of “happiness potential” of each species as perceived by us, Dr Harris explains in his lecture. When a human child dies, the sense of sorrow and empathy that we feel for the child’s parents arises out of the knowledge that not just has a life been truncated but a full life of potential happiness has been snuffed out prematurely. We do not hold the same logic while feeling for a dead rodent or an annihilated termite. We feel more for our fellow human beings and less for other members of the animal kingdom in varying degrees. With advancement in knowledge, we have become more keenly aware of how this moral-empathy emotion works inside our brains. Renowned neuroscientist V S Ramachandran's brilliant book, The Tell-Tale Brain, beautifully explains the mechanism of synaptic firings in the mirror neurons in our brains that excite the empathy-morality mechanism within us. This is how our morality operates within our minds. And, nothing in any of this is even remotely concerned with religion. If one were to get up and offer his seat to an old lady in a bus, or to a pregnant woman, it would be purely out of a sense of morality. If a person donates a pint of blood every three months, he does it purely out of the understanding that his blood would be useful to another human being who might need it. This is morality. This is human solidarity. Nothing in either of the above moral acts is dictated by religion. These acts could be carried out identically by a believer or a non-believer, with an observer having not the slightest clue about the religious orientation of the actors involved. I am an inveterate non-vegetarian and relish chicken wings on my plate, both fried and roasted. The crispier the better! But, I personally know many people who have given up eating meat after being appalled by a visit to an abattoir. The sight of spilled blood and disembowelled gut, and the sense of moral outrage that comes about upon witnessing an animal being slaughtered for satisfying our gastronomic desires, led them to give up meat. Such a decision has to count as one that is brought about by a sense of morality. But, what exactly in such a moral decision has religion any role to play? Quite simply, nothing! By adopting a very high moral position, it can perhaps even be argued that killing an animal by a human being for the sake of food is highly immoral. But, we know that this is not the case with other animals. We would, by no stretch of imagination, categorise the hunting of a deer by a tiger as an immoral act. We reserve morality purely for human beings. This is understandable. Morality is a part of our intellect. And, intellect has evolved with the species. In fact, religion abets killing. And, we are not talking about pilots crashing their airplanes into skyscrapers in Manhattan. Some faiths actually consider it a scared duty to sacrifice animals in the name of religion. An angry, blood thirsty goddess Kali is propitiated by slaughtering goats – sometimes as many as one hundred and eight goats in front of one deity. It is unfathomable that we still choose to call such a God benevolent, whose pleasure rests on a bed of carcass and blood. Until a few centuries ago, human sacrifice was common to please Kali. Eid-ul-adha is a holy festival in Islam, wherein a believer must contribute to the goodness of his/her religion by means of a slaughter. It is a curious event that has its origins back to Abraham and his attempt at sacrificing his son Ishmael (the Jews believe it was Isaac) that was eventually aborted by divine intervention. I say curious, because the act of prevention of the sacrifice by God (through his representative, an Angel) has been turned on its head over the centuries into a custom of animal slaughter by the followers of Abraham and of the many derivative religions. This is beside the fact that only a pernicious being could demand of Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test his loyalty. Why an omniscient God, who obviously already knew the outcome of the test in advance, would ever need to go through this charade is anybody’s guess! Then, what is it that separates the morality of the habitual meat eater, who pays to get an animal slaughtered at the abattoir and the believer who does it in the name of God. The answer, actually, is quite simple. It is hypocrisy. The gourmet kills and eats, with or without remorse, but does not pretend that he has been given the license to do so by some supreme celestial being. The believer kills and considers it to be an act of piety that has the approval of God. What gives a human being the license to be so self-righteous about an act of murder? What drives a human being into believing that shedding the blood of a fellow member of the animal kingdom will earn praise from a benevolent God? What gives man such grand ideas of delusion about acts that are downright immoral? Why, religion, of course! As Robert G Ingersoll said, “Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labours of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.” It is naïve to imagine that until the time the Jews reached the base of Mount Sinai after their wandering and were taught the commandments, they had considered theft, perjury, rape and murder to be kosher. This is what religion pretends to tell us. It pretends that it was only after the revelation did human beings come to realise that theft, perjury, rape and murder were immoral. It is facile to be told that it was religion that taught us the wisdom of the precept “thou shalt not kill”. It is plain common sense. We did not need religion to teach us common sense and then vainly boast for many millennia of giving us morality. How much more ludicrous can suppositions possibly be! Human beings did not get this far on the evolutionary chart by not knowing that all these aforementioned acts were indeed immoral and were to be eschewed. Neither did human beings survive sans religion for more than a hundred thousand years since developing cognitive skills by being immoral. Such morality, as I have said earlier, is innate in us. Such morality, as I have also said earlier, has arisen out of human solidarity, not religion. Christianity is based on the premise that Jesus, the only begotten son of God, came on earth to deliver us from the original sin. Without going into the argument of the fact than an entire religion is based upon the story of Adam’s sin and the fall of man, a proposition that is impossible to defend in the face of the theory of the Origin of Species, and the utter hollowness of the theory of creation, there could be nothing more immoral than to teach our little children that they are born of sin. There could be nothing more immoral than to teach our children that they are depraved creations of God and that they must learn to embrace serfdom and propitiate a demanding God if they desire salvation. There is nothing more immoral than to tell our women that they were born of a dirty clot of blood and that their perfectly normal physiological cycle of menstruation rendered them unworthy of respect and made them ineligible to worship the same God who they swore by. Hindu women are prohibited from entering temples and Muslim women are barred from praying during their menstrual cycles. All such proclamations are degrading to human dignity. The Hadith is a set of texts that contains stories from the life and teachings of the seventh century preacher, Muhammed. It is meant to be a code of conduct for the followers of Islam. Muhammed married Aisha when she was all of six years. It does not require one to possess the intelligence of a genius to recognise that child marriage and paedophilia are not exactly what constitute good moral behaviour. Neither can a cowherd god whose main pastime appeared to be leading a promiscuous life, cavorting with the pretty damsels of Vrindavan, be termed as the paragon of morality. The political machinations of such a god are evidenced through the entire course of The Mahabharata. The Qur’an suborns the followers to kill non-believers and apostates. Surely, these are not meant to be metaphorical or allegorical hints towards inviting a philosophical discourse. These are direct orders for murder. So much for “thou shalt not kill”! Leave aside morality, religion has been pretty active in preaching the opposite. Is polygamy immoral? Is it moral to chop off a man’s hand to punish theft? It really depends on which religion one subscribes to. It could be moral or immoral depending on one’s religion, an aspect that is purely an accident of birth. The conflict in Palestine has its provenance in the promised land of the Jews, as ordained in the scriptures. I wonder how God, if there is one, must be feeling at being reduced to a measly real estate agent by his followers on earth! The Israelites and Arabs continue to kill each other over a piece of land that is too small to draw even on a school map. All in the name of religion! Vanity Fair journalist Christopher Hitchens challenges – “Name one morally correct statement or action that a believer could make or undertake that a non-believer couldn’t. I am sure you wouldn’t find one even if you scratched your head all night. But, if I were to ask you to name an evil act that a believer would commit because of his beliefs but a non-believer would not, you wouldn’t have to wait even a moment to rattle off an entire list”. Well, this is how religion, the proud claimant of mankind’s morality actually precipitates immorality in our society. What is it that compels one to admire the beauty and innocence of a newborn male baby and contemplate in the same breath to clip off the baby’s foreskin? There are various arguments that indicate the advantage that a circumcised adult has in protection against HIV AIDS. There is some medical evidence to suggest that it could indeed be the case. But, such arguments are poor attempts at squaring a circle when proffered as justifications in the context of religion. In bronze-age Palestine, when Abraham circumcised himself as a covenant with the Almighty, AIDS was unheard of. Surely, it could not have been a device to save his promiscuous progeny from contracting the fatal disease thousands of years later. Surely, generations of male homo sapiens did not need to have their male organ mutilated, and have their sexual sensations numbed, in order to protect themselves against a twentieth century disease. It is only sadism that can cause a human being to inflict such a wicked act on a baby. Noted physicist Steven Weinberg sums it up beautifully – “With or without religion, good people would always do good things and evil people would always do evil things; but for a good person to do a wicked thing, that takes religion” It is religion that claims to provide succour to AIDS patients in Africa, but condemns the use of condoms and brands it as sinful. Organisations like Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres carry out equally effective charity work all over the world, but without the covert mission to proselytise. It is the same religion that has gone on an overdrive in influencing decision makers towards preventing the funding of stem cell research. The list is endless! Religion is the antithesis of enlightenment. A progressive human society does not need it. It may have once been mankind’s first attempt at philosophy, science and medicine. But, since it was the first, it was also the worst. It preyed on human ignorance when knowledge was scarce – when we had no idea about earthquakes and tides, eclipses and diseases; we did not know of the germ theory; we thought that Earth was at the centre of the universe and were told that the universe was just six thousand years old. We believed in Apollo, Poseidon, Zeus and Thor – all of who have since fallen out of favour and been buried in the graveyard of mythology. And, of course, we believed in the interesting story of Adam and Eve and their adventures with a talking snake in the Garden of Eden. This is an age when we need to learn to appreciate the transcendent and numinous universe as viewed through the Hubble telescope instead of believing in the medieval myth of a burning bush. We would do well to rid ourselves of this savage burden. And, one could bet one’s life on it that human beings would still remain just as moral without religion. * * *
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