Thu, 4. June 2015
The Moral High Ground
I keep seeing ignorant comments from Christians about religion being the sole owners of morality: they invented it, they govern it, anything they don't like is immoral....
This was a recent example on the Macarthur Chronicle Facebook page, regarding a post asking for public comments about Marriage Equality:
Me: Religious institutions should not be defining who should and should not be allowed to marry in a private, non-religious ceremony. A civil marriage is for those who opt out of the religious environment. Let the churches define their own rules for the marriages which they conduct on their own premises - but the time is long overdue for the Australian Parliament to put an end to State Sanctioned Discrimination in civil marriage ceremonies.
A.N.Other: Religious institutions are the one who defined this country and its morals. So yes they should have considerable say.
It's not a surprising response - because that's the myth they are taught and you expect them to repeat it - but it reeks of Christian controlling arrogance. They own morality, they thought of it first. They want the churches to control the rules for the secular marriages which people choose to have when they don't want a church wedding.
Do Christians really have inherently high morals because they are Christians?
I recall the wife of Eddie Obeid yelling at the media outside her mansion that her husband is a "good Christian" - shortly before ICAC found him corrupt. The prisons are full of convicted criminals who are "good" Christians. They are not all "immoral" Atheists, although Atheists can be found in prisons too.
The "moral" churches have fostered paedophiles and abandoned the children who were their victims. The "moral" congregations stood by meekly and failed to act. A Royal Commission is now investigating the paedophelia, cruelty and institutional cover ups. How "moral" is it to send an offending predator to another parish so he can do it all again? How "moral" is it to refuse to report heinous crimes against children to the police?
The "moral" Vatican has been ruled by religious thugs for centuries. They tortured and killed people at will, even burning women alive for being "witches". They even colluded with Hitler to kill millions of Jews. How very "moral" of them.
Many of the wars throughout history have been caused, one way or another, by religions fighting for their own cruel brand of "morality".
The "moral" bible itself indisputably contains a litany of mass murder and genocide - either committed by a "moral" god or required by it. The call the bible "the good book".
How ethical is it to force their own religion onto their children? I didn't force my Atheist beliefs on my children, nor did I force them to play the sport I love. I didn't enrol them into the political party that I was a member of and I didn't force my love of astronomy and science on them. My wife and I left all those decisions to them.
Morality comes from good people knowing what is the right thing to do, without doing it for fear of godly retribution. Telling children that they will be tortured for eternity if they don't "believe" in Jesus is pretty poor advertisement for religious morality.
We don't have morality because of religion.
We have morality despite religion.
It annoys me intensely to be preached at by hypocritical people who believe that without Jesus, no-one can know what morality means. Do they really think we are all savages?
Militant Christianity always opposes moral progress. They segregated blacks from whites and they prevented inter-racial marriages. They opposed the abolition of slavery, they oppose women's rights, they oppose gay rights and they oppose equality. They even oppose Ethics classes in schools here in NSW!
Many attempts to improve society have been opposed by the churches on "moral" grounds, including shopping on Sundays which we now take for granted. As Paula Kirby once said:
Christians certainly didn't invent morality. They may have played a part in moulding it through the centuries - but not necessarily for the better."Religion actively discourages moral progress, because religion DEFINES morality as the attitudes that prevailed hundreds or thousands of years ago".