Religion teaches morality

[Ghost14]

Re: Religion teaches morality

@ajazali

Yes people existed before Abrahamic religions but who can claim that they were not follower of any other religion and/or were not believers?

Are you suggesting that belief in Thor, or Horus, or Zeus, is valid? In that case, you’re undermining the entire premise of Abrahamic religions. Morality obviously precedes modern religions, and if previous religions were false and man made, this means that morality was man made.

@Huma

If I was buying something from you, would you lie about the price, quality, and other details of the product? No, if you have some ethics. But this morality is not human nature, people didn’t always have these ethics. Anyone remember the state of the merchants back in the day? They were so deceitful that Prophet saw said “The traders are wicked people”. Someone misunderstood him and thought that the actual profession of trade is prohibited but Prophet saw clarified himself and said no it’s because the merchants are dishonest and deceptive in their dealings and they employ ruthless tactics such as falsely swearing to God just to sell their products. So this goes to show that those people didn’t think there was anything wrong with what they were doing, that it was simply the normal way of doing trade. There’s a verse in the Quran specifically for the merchants, asking them to be honest. And that’s really how people became aware of the immoral and unethical behaviour, through Quran and Hadith, otherwise why would they have bothered changing anything about themselves? It was religion that taught them morality and people were not equally ethical previously. Otherwise what a waste of 23 years, why did Allah have to send us the Quran if we’re such know-it-alls anyway. What we call common sense today, such as the general business ethics, was not always common sense to people and this understanding only came to them with religion.

Marking up the price of your product is the entire nature of economics. You charge what the market will pay. That Apple makes the iPhone for around $200, but sells it for $700 is not unethical, it’s business. If you’re referring to people knowingly selling faulty products, then yes, that’s unethical, but this existed before religion, and continues to exist with religion. This example proves nothing.

Now, did Islam expect more civil behaviour from its followers than the standards of the time? In some cases yes, but such examples are also found in other parts of the world, and have nothing to do with Islam. For example, Buddhism is not a religion, it is simply following the teachings of a man, yet those teachings demand behaviour that is far more compassionate than common human nature. These teachings are clearly man made but compelled Ashoka to build a very peaceful and prosperous kingdom.

I think people like to attribute morality to religion because their own desires are harmful and selfish. Some people are far more capable of compassion than others. Look at the debate in Life1 about whether gays should be avoided. Some people can find compassion for those that commit sins, while others see nothing wrong with ostracizing them. Religion forces less empathic people to be civil, so they attribute this higher standard of “good” to religion, when in reality, there have always been humans with great capacity for empathy, justice, and equality.