Does secularism make people more ethical?

[Armistead]

Originally Posted by Anthony W.

Religion, when practiced responsibly and civilly, is the best way to keep a population at peace.

But it's never had that result. Historically religion was mixed with politics. Take the Roman Church, they were on the down end, the christian movement was big, not only did they join it, they reformed it to a political system in which they could control. They created many doctrines of fear, such as eternal torment, others that caused guilt. They used these tools to control people. If they couldn't, they stirred fervor and just killed. This has been the history of the world, religion has never caused peace, but caused more war and torment than we can grasp.

I think religious people seek God to make a better world or they accept the world is going to hell and only God can fix it, secular people want to fix and solve the problems of humanity in hopes of a better world.

[August]

Well one thing is sure, secular people see themselves as ethically superior. Sounds pretty arrogant to me.

[Sailor Steve]

Not all of us. To me ethics and morality exist, period. Whether you attribute it to a higher power or to innate is your choice. All this talk about who is superior has it backwards, I think. Anyone who says "I'm more ethical than you" has already missed the point.

Anyone or any group that says "I'm more Ethical than you"
is sitting in judgement of others.

That postion would not allow backing down so problems are going to happen.

[NeonSamurai]

Originally Posted by MH

Its funny....
if you talked to many RELIGIUS Jews and Arabs you would find that on basic level there is a lot respect between the two religions.
Politicalization of religion is more an issue.
Political religion is just an ideology like any ideology than millions died for....

The fundamental problem, is that almost all religions tend to express the view that only they have got it right, and logically therefor everyone else must convert to the one and only true faith. After that comes the politics and power structures, followed by exploitation and often subjugation.

There are some exceptions, but they tend to be either not really a religion (or at least not theistic), or are not organized.

[Castout]

Originally Posted by CaptainMattJ.

Herr berbunch and i share the same views then

Religion *can* teach some ethics and morals, but then turns around and spews bull****. People may "believe" in god, but more and more are realizing what a load of bull religion has become, and dont follow what they teach, such as the seven deadly sins.

I have no problem with the belief in god. Even if it is just false hope, it helps people find hope from themselves indirectly in times of need.

I have a problem with religion. they say "love everyone" and blah blah, and they turn around and say "Down with Homos! down with Atheists! they deserve to burn in hell!". Hypocrites much? I also love how they have a convenient answer for everything.

Along with their "no Homo" crap, comes the uncovering of the priests not only having sex with males, but underaged alter boys no less. Its so infuriating.

Religion IS one of the worst things thats happened to mankind. hundreds of millions slaughtered in the name of religion, oppression and hate in the name of religion. Where does it end?

That is because religion can be detached from God and from spirituality when the practitioners know neither God nor spirituality. Frankly speaking, God doesn't exactly shout loud when a person is bad or abusing religious teaching. Free will. Even God respect it. If the fools allow themselves to be fooled by distorted truth and distorted teaching then it is their responsibility and their society for having received the teaching.

Religion is like state to a society. It can go anywhere and get abused.

[Sammi79]

No, education and understanding do that. But it helps

[Castout]

Originally Posted by Sammi79

No, education and understanding do that. But it helps

Education often results in mere trained people instead of educated ones.

Understanding requires experience, common sense and insight from the particular experience.

So there may be uneducated educated person and there may be believer without understanding.

But there's also educated people and those who have understanding and reasons on what he believe in.

Most people judging from my experience have neither common sense to gain useful insight from their experience or even no experience to be gained from.

Most people who graduated came out a trained man but still not an enlightened one yet. They go back into their own society and start mimicking whatever vices in it. Instead being an agent of change, they become subjected to change from less learned people or society.

Whether one is willing to use his common sense or otherwise is free will. Most are too busy and too prejudiced to use theirs. So busy that they lose touch with their humanity and fall into pragmatism. Mankind has created an illusion so that most people have lost touch with the things that are really meaningful and replace them with petty pursuits. Mankind has created a micro world of their own within this world which is a micro itself within this created space. They lose themselves in it and in their dealings in it. The unsophisticated who think they are sophisticated is what we are. The fools who think themselves smart are us. The many local tiny consciousness who worship their own portrayed self image that we call ego.

But we will be smitten by our errors. It's only natural.

The maker of 2012 movie could not be more wrong. In a doomsday scenario money would be the least thing that matter or would survive as well as traditional hierarchy. Yet we are so attached with the accumulation of trinkets that's mostly even not real and with our attachment to technology that an expert came out with the idea of self reliance to it as the coming awakening of mankind. I'd call a total reliance on tech as enslavement not awakening/empowerment. It is us who should control our own inventions not the other way around.

I'm not saying money is not important but they are only meaningful by the way how you use them not by how fast you acquire them. The dead have no use of money nor whatever trinket.

[Skybird]

Boston University's Catherine Caldwell-Harris is researching the differences between the secular and religious minds. "Humans have two cognitive styles," the psychologist says. "One type finds deeper meaning in everything; even bad weather can be framed as fate. The other type is neurologically predisposed to be skeptical, and they don't put much weight in beliefs and agency detection."



Caldwell-Harris is currently testing her hypothesis through simple experiments. Test subjects watch a film in which triangles move about. One group experiences the film as a humanized drama, in which the larger triangles are attacking the smaller ones. The other group describes the scene mechanically, simply stating the manner in which the geometric shapes are moving. Those who do not anthropomorphize the triangles, she suspects, are unlikely to ascribe much importance to beliefs. "There have always been two cognitive comfort zones," she says, "but skeptics used to keep quiet in order to stay out of trouble."

Compare to this study:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:...l.pone.0007272

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjects fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief (judgments of ;true; vs judgments of false was associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation [3], [4], [5], [6], emotional associations [7], reward [8], [9], [10], and goal-driven behavior [11]. This region showed greater signal whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about ordinary facts. 1A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.
Conclusions/Significance

While religious and nonreligious thinking differentially engage broad regions of the frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobes, the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent. Our study compares religious thinking with ordinary cognition and, as such, constitutes a step toward developing a neuropsychology of religion. However, these findings may also further our understanding of how the brain accepts statements of all kinds to be valid descriptions of the world.

And this, about man as a homo religio, and the need to learn more about the neural substrates of religious experience:
http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/reprint/9/3/498

As I see it, man is not so much finding the ultimate reality "out there" when he sets to search for it and to examine it, but it is man himself adding all meaning to the things he perceives, according to his history of interpretation and sorting before. Thus, we do not so much find but invent "reality" as what what we perceive it.

It cannot be denied that nevertheless many people feel a deep-rooting need to believe in claims typically made by religious dogmas. And my strong impression also is that this need is not the result of an intellectual insight or a decision made by reason, but is as if something really triggers some people to believe, as if it were an inbuilt natural drive. Since two or three years, you can occasionally fetch up reports in the press that neuroscientists make progress in tracking down a relation between the desire to believe in religious stuff, and neural constellations and activation patterns in the brain. There seem to be indices for that the relation is causal and can be marked to be neural factors deciding the religious belief (the act itself, not the special nature of the ideology in question) - not the other way around.

This raises the question why nature maybe has designed man's genes to make him feel religious yearnings and make him occupying himself with questions religion claims to be focussing on. And what these questions differentiates from the existential questions arelgious and secularist and atheist people also deal with: the Why, the Where-from and Where-to, and the How-long. Only some secularists claim to not caring for these questions at all - most atheists I know are not evading them at all, but admit that while they adress such questions sometimes, for example by reading a book on philosophy, they just do not accept the answers religions claim to be able to give, especially those answers basing on theistic tales.

So, if the desire of religious believing or non-believing is "hardwired" in our brains, this has some consequences.

First, the nature of the debate needs to be reconsidered, with putting emphasis on that an argument, a fight over these issues is meaningless from beginning on, because people indeed do not have any choice to believe or not - they are somewhat geneticall programmed, at least are genetically equipped with a certain span of mental freedom that defines on what options they can decide "freely", and what not. This is the classical explanation model of degrees of freedom. How many do we have? On our religious believing or scepticism, we maybe are more limited in our free choices, than we imagine.

Second, the claims for validity of both camps - religions as well as areligious/secularists/atheists, needs to be relativised. In the end we need to see that any claims for valdity of content and for communal power, are as valid as the claim to be superior because of one's skin power.

Good, and responsible science will never claim to have given the ultimate, the final answer on something - the assumption that science could do that simply is totally contradictory to the elemental basics of scientific methodology. But this does not mean that what science finds out, is all relative by nature and can be ignored whenever it seems to be opportune, because it contradicsts long-held convictions and emotional sympathies. To change a scientific argument or theory or paradigm, just picking some idea out of the blue is not enough - you need to show up with better observations, better theories, where "better" is qualified by scientific methodologic measures and means that the new idea explains easier or more completely (or both) the phenomenon observed, and allows to make better predictions.

Believing people, however, fall into two groups, those confessing to a socially institutionalised dogma with a communal organisational framework (for example the church), and those who believe "freely", unbound by any community's dogma, and keeping it to themselves whatever they believe in. But the first group is extremely prone to wanting to put it'S beliefs onto all others, because they claim what they often - wrongly - accuse science of - that they have the final and ultimate and really really really true answers. And different to science, they see no need to ever try to proove it, test it, re-test it.

As private person as well as former psychologist I have seen that we humans want to see meaning in life. We maybe even need to see it, as a way to give order and structure, predictability and the illusion of control to a world and a cosmos that in reality probably aree chaotic, unporedictablel, danegerous - and not interested at all into our racial, civilisational and individual fates. To be marginalised to such a degree is a pill that human psyche seems to have big and painful troubles to swallow. We want our place in thew whole cosmic show, don't we? Our meaning? Our important role to play? the more religious we are, in that we follow one of the big dogmas, the more we really mean by that: the whole cosmos has to revolve around me, my soul, my afterlife. And all too often we expect the laws of logic and nature to bend in our belief's favour.

That is a transition from
an unavoidable vulnerability for despair that we necessarily are equipped with, since we are reflecting, self-aware creatures that know about their own mortality,
to
a demand of not only being part of the greater scheme of reason and explanation, but to be in control of it, and defining the conditions and rules by which such a scheme has to be formed up, and forms up the cosmos around us.

In the end, it is all just inside our brain, and maybe even the brain is just the image of an idea that in final and last and ultimate reality - if there is something like that! - just rests inside itself. We may want to consider in our sometimes bitter fights about religions that when we do these religious fights in all the world out there, we maybe just function the way we genetically are designed. The problem is that by this design some of us may be more and others may be less well-equipped to understand just that.

It seems to be an existential dilemma then that mankind cannot escape as long as evolution has not changed parts of our genetic heritage.

The mind is free to travel inside the space it can form by its imagination. And maybe our imagination is the only limit to what ultimately is possible, for better or worse.

Space travel.

[Sammi79]

Erm.. no. Training produces 'trained' people. Education produces 'educated' people. You know, logic, reason, critical thinking. Reading books. Music. Examining arguments and cause-effect systems. Social interaction with a broad and diverse peer group. Self knowledge and discipline. These in my opinion all contribute to an increased ethical sensitivity.

A musician is one trained in music. A music lover is one educated in music.

I am not saying that any state education system provides all of these things, as it certainly is not the case here in Britain. But education is a broader thing than simply state education. Perhaps a better question would be 'does secularism make people less ethical?' To which my answer would also be no. Anything that is divisive however, does I think make people less ethical. (fascism, racism, nationalism, ...insert *ism of your choice here) Organised religions can certainly be considered divisive, and money also, but secularism is not mutually excusive with spirituality. I happpen to believe that the universe is a profoundly mystical and enchanting place full of beauty, incredible ellegance, serenity, unerring chaos and unfathomable power.

[MH]

Originally Posted by NeonSamurai

The fundamental problem, is that almost all religions tend to express the view that only they have got it right, and logically therefor everyone else must convert to the one and only true faith. After that comes the politics and power structures, followed by exploitation and often subjugation.

There are some exceptions, but they tend to be either not really a religion (or at least not theistic), or are not organized.

Yes it is as there are no secular people who thing that they got it right.
Exploitation is as old as humans and has nothing to do with religion but religion or any other system is used for it.
Secular think that have the recipe for well being of whole human race.
Where fighting religion by all means is part of solution.
I have religious friends with whom i disagree on many issues...but on basic fundamental level they are as ethical as any one else.
In many cases they are much less self centered and selfish than secular people.

Religion taken to extreme mixed with politics is a problem.
Secular extremism is intolerant as well.
Just in Judaism you have extreme rabbis liberal rabbis ....so so rabbis.
Just on this forum you can find nazi christians,christians and secular nazis...go figure.
Again maybe living in Jerusalem made me relatively tolerant....to multiculturalism with all it problems....but i prefer that to some uniform zombie society.

[Sammi79]

Skybird, the reason people want to believe in a purpose for themselves and/or humanity in general is because it was taught to us by religion directly. Particularly the monotheistic religions all echo the same 'Humans are special, humans are the best, humans are gods chosen rulers of earth' It just doesn't sit well with many peoples conceit that in reality it is likely that there is no grand purpose beyond continuing to reproduce, which we share with every other living thing. This is not to say human lives can not have meaning - its what you make it. Many lives are certainly less than grand, and have little more meaning than my cats. Occasionally exceptional individuals have lives full of meaning, creation and change that effect many others lives continuing through the ages long after their life has ended. Most of us are somewhere in between.

Originally Posted by Skybird

Second, the claims for validity of both camps - religions as well as areligious/secularists/atheists, needs to be relativised. In the end we need to see that any claims for valdity of content and for communal power, are as valid as the claim to be superior because of one's skin power.

Well I'm afraid I have to point out that claims that are closer to the truth are more valid than claims that are further from it. The only fully honest and scientific viewpoint is agnosticism, but this does not give equal weight to both sides. Just because I can't prove fairies don't exist, doesn't mean there is a 50/50 chance that they do. Using our scientific method we can state with confidence 'I am 99.9% sure that god in any religious sense does not exist, though I must admit there is a 0.1% chance that this is not the case'

[Skybird]

Due to the lack of any heterogenous belief concept in atheism and secular thinking (atheism is no belief in itself, but the lack of believing in theistic concepts), one could argue that a secular society seems to be an inevitable precondtion for functioning multi-cultural societies, at least is better suited to maybe deliver on that promise than any society embracing institutionalised or dogmatic religious conceptions.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Sammi79

Skybird, the reason people want to believe in a purpose for themselves and/or humanity in general is because it was taught to us by religion directly. Particularly the monotheistic religions all echo the same 'Humans are special, humans are the best, humans are gods chosen rulers of earth' It just doesn't sit well with many peoples conceit that in reality it is likely that there is no grand purpose beyond continuing to reproduce, which we share with every other living thing. This is not to say human lives can not have meaning - its what you make it. Many lives are certainly less than grand, and have little more meaning than my cats. Occasionally exceptional individuals have lives full of meaning, creation and change that effect many others lives continuing through the ages long after their life has ended. Most of us are somewhere in between.

Sammi, the argument risen by science is that there is a neurological basis for the desire of people to believe in relgious claims, namely theistic concepts. I just tried to combine that with the psychological insight that man seems to depend on living in the belief that he is safe and lives in a secure, ordered world where the future is not uncertain. Lack of that belief can lead to very seriopus psychological breakdowns, it really can effect psychological health and sanity. There is a reason why some therapy schools even talk of spiritual crisis and spiritual syndroms.

The argument also is that there are strong indices that whether or not we more easily sympathise with believing or becoming "secular", has a genetical basis and a condensate in brain hardwiring. The degrees of freedom we have to chose for the one or the other, may be decided by our genes. Consider it to be an equivalent to "genetic vulnerability theories" that are popular in biology, medicine and psychology.

Well I'm afraid I have to point out that claims that are closer to the truth are more valid than claims that are further from it. The only fully honest and scientific viewpoint is agnosticism, but this does not give equal weight to both sides. Just because I can't prove fairies don't exist, doesn't mean there is a 50/50 chance that they do. Using our scientific method we can state with confidence 'I am 99.9% sure that god in any religious sense does not exist, though I must admit there is a 0.1% chance that this is not the case'

"Truth"?

Science thinks in hypothesis that have to be tested, theories, and paradigms. Hypothesis are being shown right or wrong. Theories stay for some time, until a better emerges from theoretical work, observation, experiment, trial-and-error. Paradigms change the slowest - but they do, every couple of decades or centuries. In the end, our idea of "working with and on reality" is feeding-back into itself to such a degree that we cannot claim to be fully objective and independent in our perceptions and conclusions on what we call the reality out there. The eye never can look at itself - even when looking into a mirror, it just is a reflexion.

My point was, if you read again, that science tries to refine its theories constantly, and should do so - while religions claim there is no need at all to test themselves because they surely own the ultimate "truth" anyway.

[Penguin]

I seem to be the only person who uses the word secularism in a different way. To me it describes the concept of separation of church and state - sometimes also called Laïcité. I think the article got translated in a bad way. The original talks about unbelievers, which the Germans also use in the sense of non-believers.

A better word would be non-deitism. It's not only semantics, as these are two different concepts which may overlap. A secularist can or can not be religious, a non-believer is not.

So, in this context: secularism is more ethical, non-belief not necessarily.