Willravel

Like a phoenix from the ashes over in Politics, a debate was born: What came first, Religion or Morality?

Respected conservative poster NCB mentioned that not killing, not stealing etc. were Judeo/Christian morals:
to which I rsponded:
to which NCB finally responded:
So here we are with a very interesting question (that might not even have an answer): Did religion birth morality, or did morality birth religion?

Mantus

Morals are a social contracts that benefit most of the individuals in a society.

Morals are certainly not inate because there are many conflicting morals around the world - poligamy vs. monogamy for example.

Religion is as old as civilization. Both developed along side each other.

If we look beyond civilization we can generally see that all social species possessing a high animal inteligence show signs of social "rules". Whether they are instinctive is still a question to be answered.

Yet if animals possed social rules it can be asumed that at some point in time social rules went from being instinctive to cognitive for human beings.

Most of the basic morals are very simple and logical generelly giving benefit to all who follow them by keeping society in order.

Religion does not create morals, the people who influence the religion do.

Just some thoughts.

Willravel

Excelent points, Mantus. You are suggesting that neither came from the other, but they developed hand in hand as humans developed and became social and self aware, yes? Morality, or a version of it, can be found in social animals. Watch packs of dogs or primates for proof of that. Maybe the question that addresses this thread might be if primates and more inteligent animals are able to have some basic (and I mean BASIC) understanding of some higher being, like God.

Not going back as far, morality had to have it's place in religion. If you believe in a religion, you might believe that a supreme being made us and taught us to be higher than the animals, thus giving us the roots of morality. Our social interaction and rules of our society are part of what seperates us from the animals. The morality is usualyl intertwined with the lessons from the divine being, as a gift. We are required, or asked depending on the religion, to adhear to the rules. The Ten Commandments in Judism and Christianity are a good example. Those are a very specific set of rules given to us directly from God.

On the other hand...it is also possible that religion was a tool created by teachers and philosophers to teach the rules of society to people. As people tend to want rulership and guidence from someone or something infalable, God would be an excelent answer. Man creates God to give men reasonable boundries in society.

martinguerre

to me...religion has a different place than moral codes. they may authorize a particular morality, or justify one...

but there has to be something more there that just the law. Hammurabi gave laws...but nobody that i know is a Hammurabian. Make sense?

i need language to talk about life...and that's where religion really comes in. i think i would have an amorphous "faith" or spirituality...and always sort of did, even when i wasn't religious. religion is the process of having a story written on to your life, and then going back and using your life to re-write the story.

people don't really seem to do that with "morality" as such. my two cents.

__________________
For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

Willravel

That's quite poetic. Does your morality come from any particular story?

NCB

Ah, good topic!! I was wondering if you saw my post or not.


I think you may be onto something here. IMO, I think that religion does create morals, but the people who influence religion tend to give more weight towards some more so than others.

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Charlatan

I like to think that morals are a seperate thing from religion as I see myself as a moral person and yet ascribe to no religion.

Mantus does raise an interesting argument about religion and society growing hand in hand... The only thing I would add to that (or clarify) is that the Judeo Christian religion did not spring from a vacuum. It evolved from a myriad of know and now forgotten traditions.

So it isn't God per se, that lays out morality rather it is humanity and their various traditions...

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

roachboy

i have never really understood the function or interest in chicken-egg questions like this, particularly when they are framed in such a general way, or involve a history that trails off into the mists...ncb's basic claim is simple: without religion, christianity in particular, no morality. which i think is nonsense. without the judeo-christian tradition, no morality. again, total nonsense. patronising nonsense, no less--it assumes that the judeo-christian tradition represents some kind of peak in human development in general--which is a claim i suppose you can make if you also happen to be writing ths histories--the claim is in itself wholly arbitrary--but the arbitrariness has not stopped cycles of repetition.

on this question in general, like many others, nietzsche was basically correct. but then nietzsche actually defined what he meant by morality--which has not happened here. for nietzsche, the notion of morality involves a particular way of expressing and administering the rules that limit/delimit actions within a social group. it is of a piece for him with a kind of bureaucratization of social life--morality tends to be written, it tends to be imposed and.or enforced on the part of particular institutions that claim to be acting in the name of "society" or "humanity" or "the community of believers" but which in fact act primarily from self-interest (the main self-interest being the perpetuation of the institution itself--in this case the church). because it is formal and imposed from outside (in nietzsche's view--more or less) it functions as a mechanism of oppression. because morality is defined in such a way as it is not equivalent to politics or even to ethics in his work, it can be opposed or criticized without the result being that one is simply advocating anarchy or the breakdown of any possibility of social order.

more specifically, for nietzscche the notion of morality is linked to the question of metaphysics, that is of a philosophy that sees truth as unfolding at the level of stable, eternal forms--historical reality is a kind of epiphenomenon. it follows, then, that this notion of morality operates to erase the fact that human beings make their history as they live through it, that they themselves posit the rules that delimit what actions are and are not acceptable and that they are themselves responsible for the rules and their implications.

this intertwining of a philosophical project that understands truth to reside at the level of form opens the way for the conflation of christianity with Truth and the notion that christianity therefor has some kind of pre-ordained monopoly on matters that pertain to the dictating of social norms.

ncb would appear to me to have no interest in either defining morality as a subset of the larger question of social norms, nor in making any split between the role of christianity in particular and the question of social norms. the viewpoint i see operating is that all the above terms are functionally equivalent: morality with social norms in general, chrisitianity (which is really the only religion being referred to here) as necessary for the promulgation and enforcement of these rules. from which it also follows that ncb is a believer, and that from a viewpoint shaped by ssuch belief, the claims seem to not require examination. this too is an arbitrary position, if seen from viewpoints that do not share the assumptions that, for ncb at least, coincide with belief.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

roachboy

by the way, you could raise parallel questions about the notion of religion itself--whether it makes sense to use the term to categorize all types of spiritual practices in all contexts over all of time--or whether this categorization posits christianity as the prototype for all such practices and (at the same time) reduces all types of spritiual practice to variants on christianity.

[[you run into paralle problems if you visit an african "art" exhibit in a museyroom--the objects understood there as art operate in very differently configured contexts--the notion of art sits across these objects, organizes them, in a most ambiguous manner that only really makes sense if you approach the objects knowing only what the museyroom tells you about them. as with most ideological claims, ignorance seems to be the precondition for understanding the claims as coherent)

the problems of this importing of assumptions about the role and nature of spritiual practices through the category of religion become obvious from a viewpoint that is concerned with any of the method problems that a comparative approach to any social/historical phenomena raises.

these type of claims--that all of history and all of social reality can be processed as variants of christianity, as variants of european culture--arrayed along a timeline such that other forms appear "less developed" or like "children" in comparison with euro-chirstian "adults"--is a pure relic of the colonial order that delighted so many people from the late 19th century onward.

the summary: religion and morality: i do not know what are are talking about really on either terminological count.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

When I say "morality", I'm not just refering to christian morality. There are moralities from Asia, Northern Europe, and Africa that developed independantly of Christian morals. The intersting part is 1.despite the fact that the moralities developed far away from each other, they share commonalities that are too bold to ignore. 2. While many do not agree, the idea of a supreme creator was a focul point to almost every developing civilization in history. Atheism is much more recent than religion. That means that each civilization came up with the explaination of a superrior being, a creator (and maintainer, if you will) that deserves worship, praise, and focus.
Putting 1 and 2 together is what my post is about in my mind. Is it possible that religion and morality are inate? Is it possible that the reason that such complex ideas developed in every civilization becuase of God (or a god)?

roachboy

1. you can find commonalities in any set of variables if you are willing to ignore enough to do it.

2. you still did not define morality in any real way. you conflate it withe social norms in general. this conflation does not seem to me justified. you certainly do not justifyu it in your post, will.

3. that there needs to be social norms is obvious. there does not need to be morality. the christian notion of morality is a particular development, the result of a particular history, a particular set of philosophical assumptions, etc.

4. i do not see the logic that could possibly link the need for social norms--which are simply functional--to anything remotely like intellegent design. you do not need to posit some god to explain that it might occur to groups of human beings to work out for themselves that killing each other (within the boundaries of a group, however that is defined) is probably not functional--to figure out that kinship relations get hopelessly muddled if incest is permitted generally. etc.

5. things get even worse for your position if you start taking account of actual history in thinking about this--for example thet strictures against types actions are usually tied to particular types of property laws (inheritance patterns, etc.)

6. i do not know what--beyond pain avoidance--could possibly be understood as an innate human capacity. say you carried out the analysis you claimed to have carried out in your last post, will--and you find that killing people within a given community is understood as being a problem by most communities. except in particular situations, of course (sacrifice, etc)...this could follow from the fact of community, from the fact of making a distinction between inside and outside...how would you go from this to a claim about innateness? i dont get it.
[[btw your religious position is not an argument in this regard. because there is no way to move beyond the predictable conflict that woudl seperate the assumptions predicated on belief in a particular system from the viewpoints that do not--there has to be a logic to this shift that can be argued apart from a priori linkages that follow becuase you might be a fundamentalist protestant, say--not that you are, will--i am just using it as an example]]

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

I suppose, but that hardly disproves anything.

Of course, how silly of me. Morality: A system of ideas of right and wrong conduct. Upon morality social conduct is usually based in some way. While people do not follow morailty, you cannot deny that many social rules are built on the underlying morality of a given community.

Are morality and social norms mutually exclusive? Right and wrong are built into laws, therefore there is a direct connection from morality and social rules.

How many people have you killed lately? Now can you tell me that you have not killed someone because of social norms alone? Or is it possible that those social norms are in fact based on the morality that teaches that murder is wrong?

Maybe you, as someone who clearly has knowledge of history, can help me out a bit. What society has not had laws based on right and wrong? If you named some, how did they fare?

You're right. There is no aparent solution to this argument. That's what interests me.

roachboy

will--

in your second response, you repeat the problem i have been trying to address: morality is a particular way of framing social norms. the entire post above about nietzsche addressed this, i do not see the two terms as identicai--i basically am asking you to demonstrate, somehow, why you would think they are.

written law is also a particular historical development. written law, social norms and morality are not like three sets you can lay over each other and thereafter see as identical. this should be obvious.

that a social subject would internalize the rules of behaviour that obtain at a particular period is also self-evident---they are elements within a broader rationality (in weber's sense) that would enable a social subject (an "inidividual") to function at all.
morality does not account for all of rationality. it simply does not. there are a myriad ways of interacting with others, with the world, that are structured socially but are not linked in any direct way to "morality"

i too operate within the rationality that obtains in the context within which i find myself. so i have not killed many folk of late. because of my relation to this same grid, i probably would not do it in a war situation either--a context in which the dominant "morality" would sanction killing others.

what is right and wrong is a function of how inside and outside a community is defined---so for hundreds of years, it might have been right for memebers of one kinship network to kill members of another over some grievance, becaue this boundary would be mapped along the boundaries of the kinship network. the prohibitions on killing do not follow from an absolute prohibition on killing--rather they are shaped by the boundary inside/outside, which is a social-historical variable. if you play the right/wrong game, then you run into all kinds of problems: capital punishment or war in the present, the state's "monopoly on legitimate violence" in general--historically the actions of the inquisition, of european colonialism, the american genocide of native populations, on and on and on.

lots of societies have understood right and wrong differently than you might will. maybe that is because the idea that there is anything like an absolute on this is a particular philosophical perversion.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

Are you mad at me? I'm not looking for absolutes in anything (because it's even arguable that absolutes exist). I'm trying to figure out if moral and religious commonalities are coincedental. I am opening a topic up for debate, I'm not trying to force my supposed beliefs of a singluar morality on anyone. I don't really apreciate the word "perversion" being applied to thoughts that I'm trying to get input on. I'm not here to argue. I'm here to learn. Are you willing to teach?

As much as I'd like to think myself a great philosopher, I am really only a novice. My interest in philosophy is relatively new, steming from a past interest in religion. I just got a book on Nietzche the other day, and I have yet to crack it open. (Embarassed to say this..) I have no idea what Nietzche taught. I'm still just a 21 year old kid trying to figure out as much as he can. Your post is facinating, if a bit confusing. So morality and rationality are not universally linked. That makes sense. Ratioonality is based on logic (I think), and morality is based in right and wrong that may not always follow logic. I was not suggesting above that social conduct is totally morality, but it has many roots in morality, as I understand it. Why do men hold doors and pull out chairs for women? Because it is morally correct to automatically show respect for women in some moral codes. That is how I rationalize my argument. Why do some people oppose the death penalty? Is that even a social issue?

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. We're in agreement that "social norm" means a pattern of behavior expected within a particular society in a given situation, yes?

meembo

I think morality can exist entirely without religion. Ask an atheist. It doesn't directly answer the original question of which begets the other, but the existence of one without the other only applies in one direction -- morality without religion. I don't think anyone can make an argument or example of a religion without morality, so I believe one is the building block of the other, morality the building block of religion.

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Zeraph

Animals don't have morality. Morality is a system of right and wrong behavior. Sure WE can apply morals to their actions, but the animals are not stopping and thinking "Gee is this the RIGHT thing to do?"

And I think morality obviously came first. Religion started out as a way to pacify our fears of the unknown, and (again at first) had nothing to do with morality. Of course, this partially depends on how you would define/think of religion.

Zeraph

Rationality is not always based in logic. Rationality is based on reasoning which may or may not be logical. And logic is a specific mode or system of reasoning.

For example I can be rationalizing that when I wear pink underwear I hit more homeruns...but that isn't logical.

roachboy

for max weber, rationality is a term that refers to the rules that determine social behaviour. it had nothing to do with any evaluation of those behaviours.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Hain

OK I am not a renowned debater on topics as open as this. Roachboy, what difference if this "argument" is based on a foundation that morals lead to social norms, which lead to written laws. It's a logical progression of simple to complex. A person with more power than most has a moral, which is copied by others to become a social norm, which later inflates to a written law.

To me, religious texts are like large story books with a lot of morals and rules to live by, with benefits and punishments. Religion than can be a great way to live your life, as long as it doesn't try to force itself on others. If someone has similar beliefs, then most likely one will be drawn to that religion.

A moral person simply has their system of honor, right and wrong. It may not be written down but what difference does that make when that person lives by these things.

So why not morals and religion were independently forged, and quite possibly one influenced the other as they have in the past. However, I believe that God does not require believers whatsoever, but back when morality began to fail, religion was strengthened with adding the fear of burning eternally in hell.

So what did come first: chicken or the egg--morality or religion.

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asaris

Can we make a distinction here? It seems as if we're talking about two different things, ethics and morality. By ethics I mean social norms; by morality I mean a system of norms that is extra-cultural and non-relative (at least, largely non-relative). It's clear that we have ethics, and that these are relative to different societies. A non-problematic example here is of driving on the right-hand side of the road. All Americans do it (at least, normatively), but we all recognize that there's nothing metaphyiscal about it. The British aren't bad people because they drive on the left-hand side of the road. On the other hand, the existence of a system of morality is open to question. IF we assume either the existence of a supreme God who wants us to act in certain ways or enough of a human nature to provide us with a teleology, we have morality. Otherwise, I don't think you can get it.

So what does morality have to do with religion? I don't think there's any necessary connection between the two. When the Greeks first came up with morality (I'm thinking of Plato here), it wasn't connected with religion but with human nature. On the other hand, Jewish morality was deeply connected with their religion.

So which came first? Let's look first at ethics and religion. Looking at it through secular eyes, they have different purposes. Religion attempts to make the world more understandable, while ethics attempts to make the life of man a little less nasty, brutish, and short. So does morality come from an attempt to universalize religion or an attempt to universalize ethics? I don't think there's any one answer to this; it depends on what society you're looking at.

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche