Religion teaches morality

[Ghost14]

Re: Religion teaches morality

@Huma

You don’t have to be a believer in religion, Ghost, to have the heart to acknowledge that it does teach people good things. And that’s the simple question being asked here; whether or not religion teaches morality. You weren’t born with all the ethics in the world.. your parents, your teachers, your society taught you a lot and religion is simply another source for learning.

The original premise was that humanity’s morals come from religion. I believe this is false as morality existed before religion.

If you’re arguing that religion can teach morals, then yes, perhaps that’s possible, but we can never know whether a person is “good” because of religion or because of their nature, so I won’t argue against that. I think religion teaches (or in my cynical view, forces) people who would otherwise be immoral to behave properly, but we still see people acting against what their religion teaches. Furthermore, we see great variation in interpretation of religion, some people choose harsher interpretations than others. Is that not human nature seeping through? That is what I was referring to earlier: we all have different capacities for compassion, which in turn shapes our morality, and religion is just a lens through which we apply our own biases. These biases are determined by both nature and nurture, i.e. morality exists outside of religion.