Thursday, May 17, 2012

Morality Week: The Story of the Moral

From the great Dog-Matic & the Beagle
In my last post I pointed out that Christians tend to argue one of two positions.
  1. Religion provides our morality through scripture.
  2. Morality is objective and we all have a God-given sense of right and wrong.
This comic makes a good point why stance one is faulty, but seemly argues in favor of stance two if you believe that we "just know" because God provided the knowledge.

My last post argues how stance two works itself around to stance one. Throughout "Morality Week" I've argued for reasoning as the source of our morality. We "just know" because deciding racism, rape, slavery, and child abuse is obviously wrong in most of the modern world. I doesn't require much analytical thinking, it's obvious. It's nice to think that these values are objectively wrong throughout the ages, but there is evidence to the contrary. Racism was common just a heartbeat ago in the grand time line of humanity. It still isn't valued in many locales worldwide. That same can be said for rape, slavery and child abuse. I'm glad we live in a progressive society where equality is valued by all and not just the oppressed, but it is far from a given.

1 comment:

  1. That people think we need a holy book for us to know right from wrong and that we'd all turn into amoral lunatics without it is... slightly disconcerting.

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