Scott wrote:The Clarity Of Amorality
by Scott Hughes
Morality consists of moral values used to judge conduct, events, and people in general. It refers to the way people try to universally categorize human conduct as right or wrong, or good or bad.
Morality originated from religion. In the earlier days of human civilization, the lack of telecommunications and lack of fast transportation separated humankind into small, isolated communities. As a result the religion in each one of these communities would dominate the community. Since those isolated communities had little contact with other cultures and religious beliefs, they took their own religion as simple truth.
I don't think it's right to say that morality originated with religion Scott. For one, this suggests that early hunters and gatherers did not feel empathy or sympathy for others, help each other out, or do nice things for each other, until Shamans came around and started telling them to? That seems quite wrong.
Further, I was reading Jared Diamond's "The world until yesterday" which has a detailed section on hunter/gatherer religions, and basically, if you look at examples of these sorts of religions, there is nothing in them about how people should behave towards each other. They are world creation myths, and things like that, but hunter/gatherer religions do not prescribe behavior. This comes from anthropology data from new Guinea, Africa and South America, where hunter/gatherers were studied before they modernized.
Religion, it seems, only starts to prescribe correct behavior when city/states come into being. Then you get religions that tell people how to behave. The theory as to why this is, is that, for hunter gatherers, a stranger means danger. Strangers are viewed with great suspiscion and fear, and often killed on sight. You meet a stranger while picking roots, it's flight or fight time. You don't know what their intentions are.
So the thought is, that when cities grew big, you needed a way to keep strangers of the same city from killing each other, and the answer was religion. Make people in your civilization part of a collective whole, and they can get along without killing each other so much. That's Diamond's theory anyways, and I'm guessing that he doesn't think people consciously did this, rather religion evolved to accomadate early civilization.
Scott wrote:
However, as the world has globalized, the different communities have come into more and more contact with each other and have begun mixing. With multiple religions in the same society, the society could no longer use a single religion as its law and value system. As a result, society developed secular laws and values that applied independent of any given person's religion.
Naturally, society derived its new secular values and codes of conduct from its religious values. For the most part, it just rephrased the religious commandments and values from the dominant religions in more secularized terms. The "sinful" became the "immoral."
Developments in science also have led to more secularization of society because science can more reliably explain what people would otherwise rely on religion to explain. Also, people questioned their own religion more once they came into contact with other religions.
However, the archaic idea of morality remains. Even many so-called atheists talk as though some metaphysically universal set of values exist to determine the goodness or badness of people or actions. They do that by referring to people and actions as morally good or bad.
Many Athiests, like most people, tend to care about the welfare of others. Just like hunter/gatherers did. When you care about others, then you don't want to see them hurt and you want to see others being happy. This makes you act morally towards them. Then your behavior might seem to conform to some set or rules. Really, you just want to see other people in good states, so for the most part, you don't kill them, don't hurt them, and try to help them when they need it.
This is a pretty big and important part of many people's lives, caring and acting in the interests of others. Many people can't help it, and they don't want to help it. So there's this word for all this : morality. It doesn't come from religion.