Monday, July 9, 2012

On the Purpose of Religion: Morality

Morality is typically provided via a combination of great incentives and equally severe punishments. These are often some of the core tenets of the religion and dictate people's actions every day.

Karma is the supernaturally enforced version of "what goes around comes around." As an extension, some Eastern religions' versions of reincarnation include a sort of judgment. Do good, and be reborn as a human; do evil, and be reborn as a slug. At the end of the scale is the divine judgment of the afterlife found in religions such as Christianity, where the stark contrast between heaven and hell is all the motivation required to be a moral citizen. 

I would think that people can be moral without such positive/negative reinforcement, and I gain hope from the fact that atheists are not simply evil. Mechanisms like the philosophy of ethics and psychology of social norms indicate that there are other avenues to give a society morality.

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