I really need to be doing things...

[avevale_intelligencer]

...but I can't let this go. Someone (whom I won't name because I don't know if they want their LJ and FB identities linked) just quoted on Facebook:

"Morality is doing what is right no matter what you are told. Religon is doing whatever you are told no matter what is right."

As an example of the statement that sounds good without at any point touching on truth, I don't think that can be bettered, and it shows up how insidiously persuasive a nice jingly Wildean paradox can be--I almost found myself nodding sagely at it for a second. But good grief, morality is *all about* what we're told--morality is tribal. And as for the stupid, facile old canard about religion being mindless obedience, I don't even need to bother refuting that, do I? I'm sure I've done it before, anyway, and I haven't got the spare computer time right now.

So, let's compose some nice jingly Wildean paradoxes.

"Bacon and eggs are tasty without being healthy. Muesli is healthy without being tasty."

See how it works? You have a try. See how convincing you can make any old rubbish just by balancing two phrases one against the other.

I'll check back tonight. I may award points.

Comments

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

In fact it's a much more complicated and amorphous set of things including relationships, communities, actions as well as words and beliefs.

Except that relationships and communities don't require religion; they can just as well be built around something else--a common interest or culture, for example. So I don't think of them as "part of religion" but more as entities that accrete around many different things, one of which is sometimes religion. At which point the religion part of religion, for me, is religious words and beliefs--many of which turn out to be commandments of one sort or another.

What is the 'something else'? I don't think there's anything which is an adequate yardstick of the type you describe.

The something else is:

- parents
- friends
- teachers
- the media
- things we have studied, formally or informally
- our gut instincts
- books we have read
- our own experiences
- the reported experiences of others
- our desires

And

-our own good sense about what hurts and doesn't hurt people (and to a lesser extent animals) and what are fair and unfair ways to behave. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is actually not too bad as a rule of thumb.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

Except that relationships and communities don't require religion ...

Of course not, but nor do words or belief. There are religious and non-religious relationships, communities, words and beliefs. It seems really arbitrary to decide that religion = religious words/beliefs but not religious relationships/communities.

Similarly, why do you single religion out as a 'middleman', but not teachers, parents, media, gut instinct etc.? It seems unreasonable to give it a special, lower status.

As for 'our own good sense about what hurts and doesn't hurt people', doesn't that come out of all the intermediary things we've been listing, sometimes including religion?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Blink.

Maybe I'm not getting this because I've never been a part of a religious community. But isn't the aspect of a religous community that makes it important to its members the fact that it's a community? I mean, you know the people in your church because you happened to all go to the same building once a week for a long time, and hey, great, a bunch of them turned out to be compatible, personality wise, and then you worked on some projects together and now you've known each other for years and would help each other out in a heartbeat, and of course who doesn't value that?

But couldn't you get the same effect if what drew you to the same building and got you working on the same projects so you got the chance to become long term friends, was something that was not religion?

I see religion as a middleman because to me it looks like a middleman. I see all kinds of different indications of that; most often people using it to justify hurting people, and people who avoid doing that by choosing to discard the hurting bits. Some of them go to the effort of finding bits in the religious teachings that can be interpreted as telling them the hurting bits don't count--but what made them know those were hurting bits and look for a way to discard them?

As for 'our own good sense about what hurts and doesn't hurt people', doesn't that come out of all the intermediary things we've been listing, sometimes including religion?

Well, religion has never helped *me* know this. And I feel like I've done a reasonable job so far and I've never felt any lack. And I've never seen anyone else helped by it while I was observing. And I've certainly seen people misled by religion in this department. So that's why I think what I do.

Frankly gut feeling (admittedly probably heavily informed by my parents when I was too young to remember) and my own good sense pretty much do it for me, I think, though the concerns of my community have sometimes drawn my attention to issues I hadn't considered, and people's discussion of issues have sometimes made me look at them a different way.