Thanks for your comment. The massive perspective shift you mentioned is something I have dealt with as well. My deconversion lasted a little over a year, and most of it wasn’t fun. It’s the process of realizing that all the things religion takes credit for (morals, purpose, life itself, even scientific advancements) can be appreciated more fully with a rational view of reality. Yet it’s a hard paradigm shift to make, especially for those who have been raised in religious environments.

I came from a fundamentalist background, and I remember being convinced that anyone who didn’t believe in God had no basis for his/her morality, and could not give an objective criticism of crimes like Hitler’s. It is funny how my perspective has changed and now I see no difficulty in nonbelievers having strong, objective moral beliefs. For me this transition was a long and painful one (with the fear of hell adding to the pain). I’m not sure what will enable others to make that transition, but perhaps articles like this will help ease it.

Nevertheless, I think it’s safe to assume that people can and will feel remorse for evil actions whether they are outside Christianity or within it.

The troubling part of the equation for me is the essential “belief” part. In Christianity, you’re not saved just by feeling sorry for all the bad stuff you’ve done, or even by punishment and retribution (unless, you know, you believe in purgatory). In Christianity, you’re saved because you had the chance to read the Bible AND you were able to pay the deep intellectual price of credulity.

Good people will go to hell forever. Bad people who believe in Jesus (and, yes, feel remorse) will go to heaven. This is the basic injustice I was referring to in the paragraph you quoted: “It’s an arbitrary ‘who does Jesus love’ kind of deal that exalts ‘who you know’ over ‘who you are.’”

That’s not exactly correct. More than belief is required. God’s forgiveness is required, and that implies sincere remorse.

God can forgive almost anything if there is real remorse, and the person at the end of their life passes God’s judgement.

You are second guessing God’s judgement about what is right in your argument to reject God, by applying the idea of revenge, or retribution, as justice.

The Christian idea of forgiveness is not part of human nature, it requires rising above it.

If you reject that, you do reject Christianity.

By the way, the root of morality has to be empathy. The basis of morality is considering others in society, and society as a whole, and that consideration is rooted in empathy. However, I do agree that empathy should not be the only consideration.

The Moral Sense

I think it does a credible job at walking through the development of morals in children in particular…

If you can empathize, you know slavery is wrong. It doesn’t mean that you won’t still practice slavery because it makes your life easier. When life became more comfortable through innovation man abandoned slavery and indulged his sense of empathy.

Empathy gives you the ability to discern right from wrong. But you can’t be empathetic when you’re uncomfortable and struggling for survival.

Universal moral absolutes are only for comfortable men. In life or death situations, men will kill, manipulate and enslave to ensure survival.

There’s a difference between social mores and a complex, secular moral framework. We can look back at slavery, for example, and say without qualification that it was immoral–even though it was largely within the bounds of what most western civilizations viewed as acceptable until a couple hundred years ago. Moral values change over time, but they could very well have been incorrect or immoral in the past by standards that are not just more modern, but actually better in an objective sense. And morality continues to develop…

I don’t believe we can ever attain a purely objective morality, but I think we can get close, based on simple principles like life and equality. It’s a matter of picking better actions over worse ones. Empathy is, of course, required for realizing that other people hurt in the same way I hurt and want to survive in the same way I want to survive, but the decision making process that fuels moral development is better served by honoring ideals (like equality) and working from there.

By saying this, I am not downplaying the importance of empathy as foundational in moral development itself (that’s really what this article was about); I’m saying that we have more tangible tools to work with when developing a complex moral system for government and society.

I would disagree that empathy is not a foundation for establishing morality.

An individual’s sense of empathy is subject to their on perceptions; therefore their personal sense of right and wrong can be incorrect. So one individual’s empathy can’t be a basis for a moral code.

Societies are made up of people who share similar traits: ethnicity, culture, economic strata, religion, etc. So to me it seems there’s no reason why a shared or similar sense of empathy can’t be considered the foundation for a society’s moral code.

Unlike ethnicity and religion, the characteristics of empathy aren’t apparent. It’s only through monitoring others actions and re-actions that you can understand society’s shared sense of empathy.

You’re always going to have outliers like sociopaths and psychopaths, but on the whole in any society most people will share a sense of empathy. This sense of empathy will always be changing because of shared experiences, knowledge gains, and just progress in general.

If you’re looking for a code of rules to live by, “collective empathy” isn’t the answer you’re looking for. But honestly neither is the Bible or the Quran because those are subject to individual interpretations as well, and no one reads the bible and does exactly what it says.

People used to use the Bible to justify stoning people, now they don’t. The Bible didn’t change but the people sense of right and wrong did.

This isn’t an original idea, people have been talking about the idea of a Zeitguist (spirit of the age) since the 1700s and probably earlier. I’ve even heard Christians describe this idea as “The living word” to justify new interpretations of the same Bible passages.

If you’re wondering how to act in any given situation your more likely to make a socially expectable decision if you ask one of your peers for advice, rather than looking to religious dogma.

Actually thinking logically about the best way to develop a robust moral system seems far superior to me than accepting with robotic faith the often immoral dictates of a bronze-age book, which is what I assume you meant when referring to a more slid foundation.