Faith and Morals
Lately I’ve heard the phrase “faith and morals” come up around political candidates from time to time, as in polls that ask voters if a candidate's faith and morals are important to them.
Do you think a relationship exists between faith and morality? I'm sure we can rule out the assertion sometimes made that atheists are immoral. Anyone who pays attention to the news or looks honestly at other people in day to day life knows that neither atheists nor theists stand out as being any more or less moral than any other large group of human beings.
That said, it may still be that a relationship between faith and morality exists. If you consider yourself a person of faith and you lost faith, would you behave differently? If you consider yourself without faith and then had a powerful experience in which you found it, or it found you, do you suppose your behavior would change?
For a working definition of faith, how about something like "a hopeful view of life as a whole?"
Spirited Child Diablog Submissions by 1-04
Do you have an inspiring child anecdote, story, or poem to post on your own blog? It might concern your own child, someone else’s child, or come from your own childhood.
If so, please email your post's permalink by Friday January 4th to martin22204 [at] yahoo.com with “child diablog” in your subject line. And do link to my November 24th post (permalink is http://www.originalfaith.com/blog/2007/11/spirited-child-diablog.html) so your readers will know about the Spirited Child Diablog too.
On Sunday January 6th I’ll post submitted links along with a brief description of each. Included will be a link to my own “spirited child” post of November 27th.
Do you think a relationship exists between faith and morality? I'm sure we can rule out the assertion sometimes made that atheists are immoral. Anyone who pays attention to the news or looks honestly at other people in day to day life knows that neither atheists nor theists stand out as being any more or less moral than any other large group of human beings.
That said, it may still be that a relationship between faith and morality exists. If you consider yourself a person of faith and you lost faith, would you behave differently? If you consider yourself without faith and then had a powerful experience in which you found it, or it found you, do you suppose your behavior would change?
For a working definition of faith, how about something like "a hopeful view of life as a whole?"
Spirited Child Diablog Submissions by 1-04
Do you have an inspiring child anecdote, story, or poem to post on your own blog? It might concern your own child, someone else’s child, or come from your own childhood.
If so, please email your post's permalink by Friday January 4th to martin22204 [at] yahoo.com with “child diablog” in your subject line. And do link to my November 24th post (permalink is http://www.originalfaith.com/blog/2007/11/spirited-child-diablog.html) so your readers will know about the Spirited Child Diablog too.
On Sunday January 6th I’ll post submitted links along with a brief description of each. Included will be a link to my own “spirited child” post of November 27th.
Posted by Paul at 8:18 PM Permalink
33 Comments:
(Yes, Paul, [to respond to your comment in the last post] it's good to be back here!)
Both believers and nonbelievers can be moral paragons and moral failures ..... Like believers, nonbelievers have both supported and suppressed the freedom of others ..... many movements of conscience have had nonbelievers as both leaders and followers.
If I lost faith, I might act somewhat diffetently (I might noe be afraid that suicide was a sin, for instance, and be more likely to commit it) but my basic morality wouldn't change. Religion cannot really create moral people, though it may sometimes be able to control their behavior.
CRYSTAL: I don’t see much of a relationship either, especially if faith is completely identified with belief, except for maybe the one you cite, which sounds like it would correspond to the fear-based one that Hazzbuzz mentions. Even there, maybe faith isn't that much of a factor in the moral lives of many believing Christians because of the emphasis on forgiveness of sins.
HAZZBUZZ: So fear and love can each be grounds for moral behavior. If someone were faithless – convinced that “everything is dust in the wind,” as the song says – do you think that would be likely to affect moral behavior as predicated on either of these?
I suppose without love it's not really morality because you'd only consider other people as far as you could see the benefit to yourself.
I think there can be no morals without faith. When there is no faith even the distinctions between what is moral and what is immoral become confused.
This probably explains why the middle class tends to be more moral. Remaining where they are they can find the maximum number of foci of interest around which they can build their themes of morality.
When a politician talks about faith to woo votes he imagines it as a pen to keep a population of obedient persons fenced in. When this meaning is taken faith can have nothing to do with morality.
I can understand that intellectually, but my personal experience was the opposite. During my “angst” period in my teens/early twenties, my general hopelessness led me to care less and less about both others and myself.
“If you love someone that gives you faith.” How does that work?
AVGW: Sounds like you may be speaking more to faith as fidelity than hope. I agree that both are major aspects, and find that it’s possible for one or the other to become more prominent in one’s experience of faith.
“I think there can be no morals without faith.” How so?
The propensity to move forward or backwards comes from how we direct ourselves in relation to this line of force. If we opt to move towards the realization of ideals using the artifacts we are moving up. If we sacrifice the ideals to gather artifacts we are moving down. In the hierarchy of spiritual ideals the rays emanating from the ultimate source of reality, by whatever name we may call it, travels downwards through the many levels to reach each and every being telling them from within what they ought to be doing.
By moral behavior we refer generally that someone is doing what is expected of him and what is beneficial to him. Who is that entity expecting things from him? What sets the reference to determine what is beneficial and what is not beneficial?
Both these questions can be positively answered only when there is faith.
‘Faith means collective faith’ is a man-made improvisation. That type of faith has only very loose relationship with morality. There morality can thrive without faith. And faith can be a very useful mask to hide one’s own immorality. Of course it doesn’t prevent people from being moral.
Do you mean that genuine faith occurs only in the context of specific religions institutions and their associated beliefs – Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, etc? Would this preclude the existence of an authentic dimension of faith that crosses sectarian divisions and is relatively free of interpretation?
Of course, even to put language to an experience is to interpret it to some degree; yet interpretations can be more or less elaborated. They can range from simple attempts to describe what an experience feels like, to formulating experiences within terms that are consistent with a larger metaphysical or theological framework.
I meant exactly the opposite. Genuine faith transcends religions. When we try to fit into the context of specific religious institutions and their associated beliefs faith looses quite a bit of its sheen.
I dare put these things in words only in the hope that you have the heart to sift from them the right meanings. Otherwise even to think about faith is a mind boggling affair. And talking about it could lead to endless arguments.
I agree that faith transcends religions - that religions around the world are so many expressions of a single spirituality which, as you suggest, sometimes strays or "loses its sheen" along our historical way...
Even if the experience is very immediate/perception-like, I wonder if some degree of learning isn't involved in coming to a keen appreciation of the reality of others' suffering...
Thanks for stopping by and a thoughtful comment. There's another thoughtful Matthew out there so if you ever comment on the same thread I may think I'm talking to the other one!
My sense of morality has changed also through these years... not tied to faith, but tied to understanding and thinking more carefully. I think my morals are stronger than ever.
In politics "morals" combined with faith is often code for things like "abortion."
As to morals in politics, me too. Never understood how a laundry list of positions on issues pretty much all relating to sex and reproduction – and either not mentioned in the Bible or barely/ambiguously referred to – ended up as the purported be all/end all of morality.
KRISTIN: I think I’ve met my match in phrase coining – not to be flip about it, but “a non-flippant pragmatist” pretty well trips up the unpracticed tongue, lol…
Seriously, it seems to me that the result of failing to embrace pragmatism in some well thought out, flippant-less sense (OK, for a moment there I wasn’t being serious…) can result in putting ideologies and credos over the actual well being of living persons.
HAZZBUZZ: I think you’re on to something.
Would there not be still more fundamental forces and motives underlying such beliefs, since we're not born with them?
no, I'm not pessimistic at all, I'm filled with wonder. I am ecstatic about life and consider it my "role" to support life in all it's forms. And death itself supports life, death becomes food for another life... cherishing life as I do, it is consoling to know that my death will feed the cycle.
the next bit on the "death rays" commented that while they were surely destroying everything in their path, they were potentially spawning new life, compressed gas clouds that might become stars - at the same time. My instant thought was "Kali!" Death and life are inextricably interwoven.
Divine, if you will, but I draw the line at conscious intent, and I believe this rules out the gods.
Life can be viewed as a cycle in the short term, but then there’s the long run. Species, as well as individuals, go extinct in time. In about five billion years the sun will become a red giant and engulf the earth. In a longer time frame, all the stars burn out and go cold. We don’t know whether the universe goes on to re-collapse and re-explode in another big bang, or stays burnt out. If it does re-explode, I don’t know as anyone’s speculated on what the resulting universe might look like, but it would seem that matter will have been rearranged to a degree that locating Hayden and Paul could prove difficult!
Could be more like recycling than cycling…
and that was the point of dragging in our current wonder, the galaxies at war. Whatever was within that galaxy is certainly being destroyed in it's entirety. What can't be destroyed is life itself.
long ago I was in despair at the destructive nature of man, then I came to consolation in contemplation of Gaia. We may destroy the nature that we know, but Gaia herself is larger, and will survive. The life that populates her may be unrecognizable, the fecund green globe that is so heartbreakingly beautiful may be gone, but there will be life. And if I can set aside the goggles of my own green-world birth, that new world will be miraculously beautiful to the life it supports.
I find that comforting.
The galaxies' "battle" (such human terms!) seems to reassure me and fill me with wonder yet again.
Instead of being in love with the miracle of humans (in love with myself), I am in love with shape-shifting eternity of life itself.
In the face of that multiplicity, that plasticity - humans seem very small and filled with hubris.
What convinces you that life itself can't be destroyed? Or, when you say "life," do you mean more like "being,” “nature,” or “reality?”
If you mean life in particular, it's quite possible, for all we know at this point, that this planet's the only place that it occurs.
If you mean being, nature, or reality, how do you reach a positive orientation toward the radical reorganizations that take place? For example, while energy can neither be created nor destroyed, loved ones are a lot more interesting before they die and their energy dissipates into less complex constructions. If I understand the law of entropy correctly, it suggests that the universe itself, overall, becomes a less complex construction over time – that the increasing complexity of life on this planet to date is a localized phenomenon, and eventually things go the other way – for example, with the planet’s incineration by the sun.
Merry Christmas, lol! I’m not trying to bring anyone down here who may be reading this. I considered all this and came out, in the end, on the side of faith – or rather faith came down on the side of me, making its entrance unexpectedly in June of 1980.
we are filled with living things; our mitochodria are assemblages of life, and they are not us, they are in us. We couldn't live without them.
When I die, I become life - food - to other organisms, which in turn will feed others. Nothing is wasted in this giant recycling action!
It's now thought that caves themselves are sometimes formed by bacteria that eat ROCK. What an amazing thing!
As for us, and death and grief: I'm reminded of the Buddhist story. A Buddhist master was told his mother had died. He cried for seven days. A desciple asked: "master, why do you cry if life is illusion?" the master replied "because a mother is the most difficult of all illusions to release!"
Hopeful is probably the wrong word for me. I expect nothing once the matter that is me dies.
Meanwhile, life is deliriously and deliciously fascinating and wonderful, and I wish to experience as much of it as I am permitted to do. Believing we only go round once, how much bigger should be my appetite for it, with all it's dread, pain, joy and ecstasy!
1. An attitude toward life of awe and wonder.
2. A belief in life going on… (Indefinitely? Infinitely? Here on earth? Elsewhere?) While there’s evidence for life’s resilience here on earth, it did have a beginning in time and there’s evidence to suggest that it may also have an end in time. So this might be described as a religious belief? That is, while available evidence doesn’t incontrovertibly counter it, neither does it emphatically support it.
In sum: An appreciation for and belief in life without belief in personal immortality.
That doesn't work for me either. Also, just looking around at the world, I have to think that if this truly works for anybody it has to be a very small minority. You hear of church scandals as much as in secular organizations. I don't see a lot by way of evidence for the idea that thoughts about a happy/bad afterlife have much of an influence on people in life as we know it.
A compressed cloud of gas can birth a star - perhaps our human-centric vision is just too small?
Today, as I was driving it occurred to me that, without having my personality and character survive, that there still might be some consciousness born into another reality that will be awed by how limited the last was (meaning, this current life), and may even remember how our species clings to it.
I believe LifeDeath is a single thing, only our ability to see changes.
Yes, I view it with wonder, awe, even exhaultation!
On what do people base their ideas of morality if not on their faith?
Let me be upfront: I'm a Christian and a presuppotionalist. My fundamental presuppotisions are that God is, that the Bible is the Word of God, that God is holy, just, good, merciful, omnipotent, etc, that man is created in God's image, that God's law is good and right and true, that Christ completely fulfilled the law, and that Christ died on the cross to redeem us who have been sinfully alienated from God.
Without faith, since people are created in God's image, they can still have a basic knowledge of right and wrong based on the common sense that God gives people, but if you think about it, then it should be clear that even this is based on faith. We are aware of "the moral law." Even those who haven't been raised in "religious homes" are aware of the moral law. The moral law is not something that we invented. But we know it is there and it is real. God is impressing it upon us in such a way that if we deny the reality of the moral law, then we are being completely ridiculous. If this was not the case, then all discussions about morality, justice, and ethics would make no sense.
From a scientific perspective, it can be argued that each of us is nothing more than the sum of our subatomic particles. But then why is murder and rape and theft "wrong"? As far as science is concerned, murder, rape, and theft is nothing more than physics in action.
But since the reality of the situation is that we are created in God's image, we have value. Therefore, murder, rape, and theft are wrong. Therefore, it is appropriate to have laws against murder, rape, and theft, etc. Therefore, we ought to love one another.
The idea of justice is not an absurdity, because we are created in God's image.
"The just shall live by faith."
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