By: Brenna Holycross
Religion may or may not make up who you are.
According to the Guardian, religion in the U.S. is changing. From 2007 to 2014, the number of people who follow any kind of Christian religion decreased while Non-Christian faiths and unaffiliated religions increased. Although the practice of unaffiliated religions has gone up, people still believe you have to believe in one or more gods to be moral. However, does being moral correlate with a person’s belief in a higher being?
First, many atheists believe moral values are inherent in morally valuable things. Atheists believe that actions do not become morally valuable just because god(s) prefers them; god(s) prefers them because they are morally valuable. If deities did not say anything about helping others, we would still think that helping others is righteous because it is moral.
Second, people can sense what is moral and what is not. Those who believe in higher powers pick and choose which teachings to follow strongly. For example, there are religions who do not believe or support homosexuality. However, there are people who practice religion who could be homosexual, and there are people who support homosexuality despite their religion being against it.
Also, taking away god(s) does not take away our want to care for other people. When you think about your relationships with your friends, if you say their worth is dependent on divine beings, that means they are worth nothing. It says that all their personality traits mean nothing. That is like saying to someone you only love and care about them because it is your duty to love anything deities do. However, atheists’ feelings towards someone do not go away because they do not believe in god(s). This demonstrates that you do not need to believe in deities in order to care about someone.
The opposing side says that atheists do not have morals because they do not have a set of moral laws from god(s). However, in the Moral Sense Test, people were asked three questions, and had to fill in a blank space with obligatory, permissible, or forbidden.
- “ A runaway trolley is about to run over five people walking on the tracks. A railroad worker is standing next to a switch that can turn the trolley onto a side track, killing one person, but allowing the five to survive. Flipping the switch is ______.
- You pass by a small child drowning in a shallow pond and you are the only one around. If you pick up the child, she will survive and your pants will be ruined. Picking up the child is _______.
- Five people have just been rushed into a hospital in critical care, each requiring an organ to survive. There is not enough time to request organs from outside the hospital. There is, however, a healthy person in the hospital’s waiting room. If the surgeon takes this person’s organs, he will die but the five in critical care will survive. Taking the healthy person’s organs is _______.”
If you answered one as permissible, two as obligatory, and three as forbidden, you are like 1500 religious people who took this study. With the view that morality comes from god(s), then atheists should respond to these questions differently, but that is not what the responses showed. There was no big difference between the subjects who were religious and the subjects who were not. Ninety percent of subjects said that case one was permissible, 97 percent of people said that case two was obligatory, and 97 percent of people said case three was forbidden. When asked to justify, both religious and nonreligious people could not explain the difference.
Because of these statistics, it is clear you can be moral without deities. Religion does not define how good or bad of a person you are, so people should not take other’s religions and judge them purely on that. Everyone in this world has different views, and the world will not be able to grow as a whole if we assume people are unprincipled. We all need to respect each other’s differences.
