Teaching Morality To The Gods

One of the episodes of the Ramayana that has always disturbed me deeply was the infamous banishment of Sita by Rama.

For what crime, one might ask.

Well, she was abducted by the demon Ravana (no fault of hers except misplaced generosity) and spent a few months in captivity in his kingdom. When Rama finally rescued her, he asked her to prove her 'chastity' to all assembled by walking through fire, which was awful in itself. Even the great Rama didn't have the courage of his convictions and was afraid of what other people might think!

Then later, even after they were back in Ayodhya, crowned king and queen and everything seemed hunky-dory, some troglodyte of a subject cast his (presumably unfaithful) wife out of his house, adding for good measure that he wasn't like Rama, who would take back a 'fallen' wife. That incident, when reported to Rama, had the expected effect on the moral coward, who proceeded to evict his by-then-pregnant queen and bundled her off to the forest. The story goes downhill from there for Sita, and this shameful part of the Ramayana is appropriately rarely told, with genteel folk agreeing to end the tale with the couple's triumphant return to Ayodhya.

The earliest memory I have of this is from Amar Chitra Katha's depiction

A scene from the episode "Banishment!" of animator Nina Paley's work "Sita sings the blues"

I was reminded of Rama's conduct when I read this news item about a man who married his girlfriend who had earlier been gang-raped. What's so heroic about this, one might ask. And indeed, it is a shameful commentary on our society that this man's decision should even be considered extraordinary. We live in a society of moral cowards where victims are blamed and shamed, and 'decent' people prove their decency by joining in the stone-throwing. So yes, in such a society, this man is nothing less than a hero.

In a country and a religion where Rama is considered the perfect man and an example to follow, I think the tables have been turned. Lord Rama could take some lessons in morality from this mortal.

As the song goes,

kabhI kabhI bhagwAn ko bhI bhaktO:n sE kAm paDE
jAnA thA gangA pAr prabhU kEvaT kI nAv chaDe

(Sometimes even God needs the help of his devotees
When He wanted to cross the Ganga, Lord (Rama) climbed into the boatman's boat)

Yup, sometimes a human boatman has to help a god navigate those treacherous moral shoals!

Lovely song by Anup Jalota , another mortal who stuck by his wife in sickness and in health
(As philosopher Alain de Botton says in his speech on "Atheism 2.0", atheists should feel free to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of even the religious works they do not believe in!)

The Atheist Dogma On Abortion

While I am in the main opposed to organised religion, I don't believe that everything (say) the Catholic Church opposes must therefore be supported by rationalists and atheists. Yes, religious beliefs often distort concepts of morality in very ugly ways, but this is not an infallibly predictable rule.

There is a Facebook site I subscribe to called "Atheist Quotes of the Day" (AQOTD). Normally, the posts here are the warm and fuzzy attacks on religious dogma and superstition that I enjoy. Recently, however, there have appeared some posts in favour of abortion, and these have not been greeted with the same degree of agreement even by the ..er.. faithful.

I have always been highly uncomfortable with abortion. I believe it is not a subject that has clear demarcations between right and wrong, and one of the mistakes made by hard-liners on either side of the debate is in assuming that there is a clear line and the other side is just not seeing it.

My point is that the line, if there is one, is highly blurred. Making an unequivocal statement of right and wrong is naive at best and dangerously arrogant at worst. So I don't want to see legislation outlawing abortion, and at the same time, I wouldn't want to see people accepting an abortion as nothing more serious than the extraction of an inconvenient tooth. (See what I did there? "An inconvenient tooth", get it?). Obviously, I would support abortion in cases of rape and incest, and also when the life of the mother is threatened. These are absolutely non-controversial to me. What makes me say "Not so fast!" is the hard-line feminist argument that a woman's body is her own and therefore there can be no questioning of a woman's decision to abort the child she is carrying inside her body under any circumstances.

I think we need to look at abortion not as a crime but as an ethical issue. That should take some of the heat out of the debate while still keeping us from turning our backs on it. I also strongly believe we should take religion out of the debate and rely on reason and empathy alone. I think reason and empathy form the necessary and sufficient foundation for a moral worldview. Religion only muddies the waters. As Arthur C Clarke said,

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Abortion should be seen as a moral issue, not a religious one. And (surprise!) atheists can have morals too. The most recent post on AQOTD that spurred me to respond showed a petri dish containing human eggs (it wasn't clear whether they were fertilised or not). The site's owner had posted a rather arrogant (I thought) statement under it: "These are not human beings. Any questions?"

Edict from the High Church of Atheism: "These are not human beings. Any questions?"

This was the proverbial last straw. I can understand dogma from the religious, but dogma from atheists?

It's a little like the vegetarian debate, which again should be divorced from religion. There are people who are strict vegans and do not favour any kind of human imposition on the animal kingdom, the "ordinary" vegetarians (lacto-vegetarians), the ovo-lacto-vegetarians who will not eat fertilised eggs (and those who will), people who will eat fish and poultry but not red meat, people who will eat "regular" meat but not dogs, cats, horses and monkeys, those who will eat anything that moves except humans, and of course, cannibals. To each group of people, those further "ahead" of them seem weird and/or immoral, and those "behind" them are unnecessarily squeamish and should get with the program.

It's a bit like the saying about driving - anyone driving slower than you is an idiot; anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.

The resolution to all of these issues is the recognition that there is no single line that divides the acceptable from the unacceptable. Real life is messy, and different people (however rational and intelligent) will fail to agree on where to draw the line. Each will draw it in a slightly different place, and we must learn to accept some degree of difference in our approaches to ethical issues without condemning people as either immoral or superstitious.

When thinking about how to respond to the AQOTD post, I weighed several response styles from humorous to sarcastic and finally settled on a tone of civilised reason:

"So, after the non-controversial arguments against believing in imaginary friends, we have now moved on to the more controversial topic of human morality. As rational people, how can we be expected to accept someone else's line on morality without thinking for ourselves?

Hear me out. 100% of rationalists would agree that the killing of unfertilised eggs or of sperms is not murder. Also, 100% of rationalists would agree that the killing of a new-born baby is murder. Clearly, all of us have crossed over from "not murder" to "murder" at some point along the development of the human foetus.

Is this point conception (the point before which development into a complete human was impossible)?

Is it the development of discernible organs (when we begin to feel empathy for something like ourselves)?

Is it the development of a heartbeat (when we begin to think of the foetus as a living being and therefore capable of being "killed")?

Is it the development of the nervous system to the point of being able to feel pain (which again appeals to our empathy)?

Is it the development of the foetus to a point where it can be kept alive artificially outside the body of the mother (which makes it a complete and viable human being)?

No matter how we look at it, the 100% of rationalists who cross over from "not murder" to "murder" do so at different points, depending on their personal philosophies, which have nothing to do with god or religion (so don't insult anyone's intelligence by accusing them of religious beliefs).

It is naive to believe that there is a single line in the sand here after which 100% of rationalists will immediately cross over from "not murder" to "murder". We are all intelligent beings who believe in reason, but we need not all agree on everything, certainly not on something as blurry as the development of a human being from individual cells.

What I am asking for is an end to dogma and more respect for the views of other rationalists. "These are not human beings. Any questions?" sounds like an arrogant religious diktat from the High Church of Atheism. It is not respectful of the considered opinions of other rationalists and leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. Let the atheist community not degenerate into another church with its own approved dogmas."

That should have kicked the hornet's nest good and proper :-). The angry buzzing must have started already. But I'm sure there will be plenty of people whose thoughts and sentiments I have expressed, so I'm not going to be alone.

The Agnostic Argument - 7 (For Good People To Do Bad Things...)

Steven Weinberg's quote is well-known:

Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things.
But for good people to do bad things, you need religion.

Parenting fail! Abraham gets ready to sacrifice his son Isaac because "God told him to". Somebody call the cops and Community Services!

My last blog post led to a discussion on Facebook with an old friend about a person's "moral compass" and where it might originate.

My friend said he knew many people who lived exemplary lives of compassion and good deeds, thanks to the inspiration of their religion. I know such people myself, but I couldn't help wondering about the source of their goodness. Was it really their religion or something more innate that made them such good people?

I can visualise someone reading in their holy book that it is desirable to give money in charity, and so they go out and do it. But what if they read in the same book that they must "slay idolators", for instance? Would they as readily obey? I'm sure they wouldn't, because otherwise we wouldn't consider them good people or as our friends, and we'd probably be reading about them in the news, and not in a good way either.

So what's really happening here when these good people read two different things in the same holy book, and they follow one set of instructions but not the other? They're cherry-picking! And the way they do that is by applying a higher sense of right and wrong to what they read, which tells them what to follow, and what not to.

So it's really a chicken-and-egg question. Is religion bettering people, or are people bettering religion? I think I know the answer to that, and the corollary then is that we don't really need religion after all!

My friend pointed out that not everyone had the gift of discerning goodness, and many people therefore need  rules to guide them, and they need the example of other people who live good lives according to those rules.

I'll grant that, but in today's world, we already have a set of good rules to live by. Take the constitution of any modern democracy and read about the rights and duties of a citizen. These man-made laws are not perfect, but then, neither is any holy book! Holy books were written by human beings, and it shows. They're riddled with fallacies, contradictions and utterly outdated ideas. At least modern constitutions can be amended to stay in tune with the times. Sticking to an unchanging set of rules will only make us look stupid as the years go by. I'll take a modern democracy's constitution over a holy book any day.

"Race Mixing is Communism," said the banners 40 years ago. No wonder they call Obama a communist...

The picture above is a good segue into my next point. The best shibboleth of morality in modern times is a person's stand on homosexuality. All the major organised religions of the world are remarkably united in their stand, and they all spectacularly fail the humanity test. To a student of nature, homosexuality among humans is natural, because it exists in virtually every other species as well. It takes a degree of emotional maturity to set aside one's own preconceptions and prejudices and to accept a gay person as an equal human being. One could argue that this level of humanism is denied to the doctrinally religious. They are enjoined to condemn behaviour that is encountered in every natural species.

This is a demonstrable example of religion making good people do bad things.

"Love Thy Neighbour", a sermon now playing at the Westboro Baptist Church

"There are no gays in Iran," said President Ahmadinejad truthfully. (We hanged them all!)

Why Can't I Own a Canadian? is a humorous deflation of religious pomposity where homosexuality is concerned, but as the photos above demonstrate quite chillingly, this is no laughing matter. Religion is an enemy of morality.

I know I'm not going to convince my friend about the evils of organised religion. It's an irony that good people only see the good side of things, so the horror completely escapes them. Now this doesn't imply that I'm a bad person, just that I'm very cynical about the world ;-). As the years go by, my sense of justice and fairness only gets sharper, and I also move farther away from religion. I don't believe that's a coincidence.

I would like the next generation to grow up reading widely, thinking, debating, questioning, having doubts. Moral certainty is a source of terrible evil, and it is better for us to doubt and question ourselves than to be certain that what we're doing is morally right "because it says so in the book". It's only through reasoned argument that we can improve our world. I'll grant that blind faith is useful when you need to summon up the courage to overcome some personal obstacles, but using blind faith in a book or doctrine to inform the way we deal with other people can be quite dangerous.

Religions too know where the threat to their existence comes from. It comes from thinking people who ask questions. That's why there's so much emphasis on unquestioning faith.

This church sign betrays no sense of irony at all.

Amen, brother.