This pages sort of follows loosely on from Christianity and the Death of Civilization
Nothing ever remains the same. Things either get better or they get worse. For all the hysteria of the middle aged and tabloid newspapers it seems morality gets better with time.
In primitive times killing strangers was considered not only perfectly normal but actually prudent behaviour. I remember recently seeing a news story about a small island in the Indian Ocean where there is still a tiny band of people who have had no contact with the outside world, any fishermen who find themselves on that island get away quickly if they can, if not they are likely to be killed and perhaps even eaten. People have tried to leave gifts of food or tools to show that they mean no harm but such gifts are always destroyed. Why can't we organize parties of Christian missionaries to be dropped by parachute there, one at a time, until we run out?
From stone age times of ruthless killing of outsiders fast forward to the classical ancient world and observe their morality. Slavery is almost universal and unremarkable. Slaves get slightly different treatment in different places, and Rome is one of the better places to be a slave, admittedly you could be pitched against wild animals for amusement, whipped if you didn't work hard enough or crucified if you got seriously out of line but there was little gratuitous torture, given a choice of being a slave in Rome or a victim of the Inquisition I would shout toga toga toga.
The people of the classical era obviously didn't have any compunction in treating outsiders as lesser mortals. The Bible is full of tales of Hebrew kings and heroes duping foreigners with no sense of doing anything remotely wrong. That attitude to the outgroup did not die out for a long time, in gypsy communities it seems to continue until the present and there didn't seem to be much of a moral issue involved with breaking treaty commitments to native American tribes and shafting them as if they were lesser examples of humanity.
The ancient Hebrews interpreted the commandment that said thou shall not kill to mean thou shalt not kill another Hebrew. Any other interpretation would be silly. It is very far from clear whether the Israeli state of today has shaken off that concept and decided that gentiles are people too.
Christianity did nothing to end the institution of slavery, although to be fair it did not actively encourage it in any way either. The Catholic Church made the keeping of Christian slaves a sin way back, but the Southern States of America didn't hold much with Catholicism and papal decrees so it was business as usual. Slavery was mentioned many times in the Bible, if Jesus was against it why didn't he say anything about it?
While the people who condemned slavery were Christian they didn't get their moral objections to it from the Bible or the teachings of Jesus because there are no teachings of Jesus against slavery. The moral objection was part of the changing Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. People simply thought it was wrong, and being religious their objections were presented as religiously motivated because any other motivation would not have been regarded as legitimate. You couldn't just do good for the sake of it, like some damn heathen, you had to do good in the name of the Lord, anything else would be sinful. Imagine the chaos if people started to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or because they saw for themselves that it was right, heaven forbid.
The Victorians were full of sanctimonious self-deception. Their hearts were in the right place in many ways but their religious convictions forced them to dress up all their good intentions as God intentions. Drunkenness was obviously a major social evil at this time and it ruined many lives, stunted the growth of millions of children and condemned millions of families to a cycle of grinding poverty. But what has fighting alcoholism and alcohol related social problems got to do with God? Nothing. Wine is right at the heart of Christianity, just think about the last supper, the wedding at Cana and before that the one “righteous” man that God saw fit to save from Sodom, a man who got so drunk he impregnated both his daughters.
The “Righteous” Lot about to be seduced by the daughters he had previously offered up to a crowd of Sodomites to gang-rape. |
That story was not, apparently, a cautionary tale about the dangers of excess alcohol, a matter which the Bible is very silent about. Methodism and the various Temperance movements that followed cloaked a social and moral policy as if it came directly from God, which is clearly a lie. Likewise the moral objections to child prostitution, child marriage and prostitution generally have little to do with religion in reality. They were moral movements cloaked up as religious because the people involved did not have the courage of their own convictions to state that certain things are simply not right without having to have the security blanket of scriptural approval for their sentiments.
After the Victorian era the next big push for moral advancement comes in America with the Civil Rights movement. Here we begin to see the first hints that it is possible to advance a moral cause as a moral cause without the need to wrap it up in religion. Unfortunately religions cannot stand by and see good done without waving their flag and both the Nation of Islam and Martin Luther King Jnr put up a strong rearguard action for the Big Lie: the idea that only religion can be a source of morality and that without religion men have no morals. But that movement was not exclusively a religious movement. It was political and it was moral, a secular morality that was not hostile to religion nor a hostage to it either. Of course any attempt to be hostile to religion would be counter-productive in America where so many people are so deeply damaged by religion that they feel guilty at every pleasure that is not immediately linked back to God.
The sixties was a time of growing tension between secular morality and religious morality. People with a message of morality who did not wave the flag of religion were shamelessly attacked and caricatured as amoral monsters, communists, agents of the Soviet Union or "Red China", subversive, evil and driven by the devil. Bob Dylan and John Lennon are obvious victims of this witch-hunt, all they were saying was give peace a chance, without a religious name-check. I suppose you could say that was the ultimate unforgivable crime, blaspheming against the Holy Spirit by having the temerity to suggest that moral sentiments could come from somewhere else. How dare people be moral without reference to God? Don't they know how offensive that sort of thing is to religious people?
Towards the end of the sixties new movements arise which are more clearly driven by secular morality. The move to legalize abortion and make it a safe was motivated by an understanding that women who were desperate to end a pregnancy would use whatever methods were available, if no safe methods were available they would use unsafe methods. Lives were lost, damaged and blighted by illegal abortion and many doctors and midwives were shamed and imprisoned for their part in providing an essential public service. The time had come to say enough was enough and to end the futile fight against abortion and to bring it within the safety of legal medical practice and even the National Health Service.
David Steel: Liberal HeroDavid Steel was the youngest MP in the House of Commons in 1967 and he lead the nation forwards by introducing a Private Member's Bill to legalize abortion and end the scourge of back street abortions killing women. Steel is a committed Christian, belonging to the Church of Scotland but his stance on abortion was not religious but moral. There is a difference. I respect men of morals and principles. |
 |
Another great advance in the sixties was divorce reform. The idea that marriage has to be for life regardless because God ordained it that way was clearly there in the text of the Bible. But religious people had shitty, unfaithful, disastrous and violent marriages too. You could search all day long for a Biblical justification of divorce and not find one but that didn't seem to matter any more. The spirit of the age had moved on. It was not religious arguments that carried the day but practical and moral considerations, utilitarian concerns. Unhappy marriages were bad for people, they caused violence, murder, unhappiness, blighted childhoods and cold brooding resentments. Bad marriages were also bad for business.
Over time divorce has been made progressively easier, less traumatic and more widely available. In the nineteenth century only the aristocracy could afford to divorce, by the end of the twentieth century anybody could afford it.
As well as divorce the nature of marriage was changing as women were given more status: and power. In the eighteenth century women were little different to servants, as many Islamic women still are, losing all property to their husbands on marriage and having to follow his lead on all matters. Women's legal rights have been progressively increased over1 time, this has had nothing to do with religion, it has been an entirely secular moral effort. It is simply an issue of basic fairness that women should be able to do what men can do with hardly any exceptions. The next part of the moving Zeitgeist will have to address whether women's equality needs to be forced against the will of women themselves, whether women should be made to want to fill the positions that other women want to see them fill. My own view is that women's rights activists should export their efforts to places where there is genuine improvement yet to be made rather than spend any energies on trying to attain absolute equality and uniformity as if that was somehow a desirable goal. To my way of thinking a formal barrier to a woman succeeding is thoroughly wrong but differential success is not proof of differential ease of access or discrimination per se. Differential success could equally well be an indication of different, desires therefore forcing equality would be a bad thing as it would force women to take up roles they don't want in order to make other women happier that they could have done so if they had wanted to, but they didn't want to either. It should not be up to a bunch of social workers and university lecturers to decide that a woman has to want to become an oil executive, a police chief or the manager of a slaughter house and the lack of a competing woman candidate is enough of a reason to give her the job. Feminists see less than 50% of vacancies filled by women as being evidence of sexism or discrimination as the alternative explanation that women don't want half the jobs is considered to be unthinkable. Why is it unthinkable? Aren't women allowed to make their own choices?
Racism is no longer accepted as a permissible way of thinking. Immigration controls are now widely race-blind in most countries which want to consider themselves civilized. Israel is of course an exception. Why is this considered acceptable? Race and religion were regarded as legitimate reasons for discrimination in immigration matters until only a few decades ago. This change of course has nothing to do with religion either. There is nothing in the Bible to suggest that foreigners were to be regarded as equals or that they should all be regarded as having the same rights and merits as each other let alone the chosen people.
Christianity and Capitalism
Is Christianity especially suitable for capitalism? Many American Christians need to believe this. Or is it simply a coincidence that all the ingredients necessary for the industrial revolution that began in Britain and spread across Europe and across the Atlantic to the USA came together within a Christian society and economy?
Credit where it is due I believe that religion did play a part. The established religion of the Church of England was a deadweight on England, but it lay less heavily than in many other parts in Europe. Since the time of Cromwell there was freedom of religion within Protestantism and yet, after the restoration, also a dominant Church. Protestant nonconformity was a major player in the industrial revolution, many non-conformists kept themselves to themselves and ran their own businesses in a way that is very reminiscent of the way Asian businessmen have operated in Britain in the last four decades. Parallel economies developed. The smartest people within the non-conformist community could not progress down conventional channels into higher education because the universities were dominated by the church. The church and the professions (law and medicine) therefore did not bleed off the best and the brightest, they had to make their own way, in trade and industry. This was taking the brakes off the economy. The non-conformists soon had plutocrats within their ranks, men who set up businesses and made money because they didn't have anything better to do.
It is said that the non-conformists had a special work ethic, this is probably true to a degree but can be overstated. The key thing was that these people had nothing better to do other than build up businesses, they were not welcome at universities or in polite society. It followed that building up great businesses and acquiring wealth was all that was left to them to do to show that they were great men. It was the only avenue to excel in and so several of them did so, almost by default. Of course the vast majority of the Quakers and Methodists and other minor denominations never advanced past the level of farm labourer, miner or factoryhand. Also not all the new entrepreneurs were nonconformists, just more than you might otherwise predict from their numbers.
Capitalism is more than just free enterprise. It also requires changes in the legal framework of a country such as the establishment of limited liability companies and legal recognition and support for concepts such as insurance, enforceability of contracts, the charging of interest on loans, recognition of intellectual property rights (copyrights, patents, trade marks and so on) and the right to be able to pass on or sell off rights and obligations. The development of this kind of capitalist legal infrastructure was nothing to do with religion at all except for the relative silence of religious objections to such proposals. Religion was no longer getting in the way of business in the way it used to do. The Church of England wasn't willing to throw its weight around as much as it had done in the past and as much as the Catholic Church was still prepared to do for much longer throughout Europe. In America the secular dreams of the Founding Fathers saw to it that no Church had enough power to get in the way of business and trade. The dead hand of the Church had been lifted, the brakes were off.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries religion wasn't getting in the way of science or technology anything like as much as it had done previously. This was all that was really required to ensure that the dark ages that Christianity had brought to Europe were well and truly cast away. The stimulation to new innovation came from a number of sources such as environmental degradation. England had almost run out of trees. New sources were required for fuel and for building. The solution found was coal and iron. Coal replaced wood as the fuel for city dwellers to warm themselves and coke was the replacement for charcoal in the making of iron and steel. Coal and iron, later steel and steam power fuelled a new revolution which is still going on. In America different challenges helped develop different technologies, the lack of skilled labour lead in moves towards mechanization, automation and standardized and uniform parts which were unknown in the high technology machines of the eighteenth century but became the standard in the twentieth. Needs drive new technologies to be invented and they soon allow other people to develop further new applications for technology. Religion can do nothing good to help, the best it can do is get out of the way. Which to its credit, it did.
Now all we need is for religion to get out of the way in other aspects of life. Nothing goes better with a belief in the great spy camera in the sky. Religion can only hinder technology and human advancement or fail to hinder it.
Religion never has been the source of moral behaviour, all it has ever done is underline and highlight ideas that we are predisposed to accept because of our evolutionary history or our increasing experience of living in a dynamic community. Living in a modern city or city-like civilization is an unprecedented experience for our species and it seems we are developing new skills all the time. Looking at old books is not going to help us develop new morality that actually works with real people in the here and now. Old dead gurus cannot tell us as much as our own direct experience. We will do much better by staying tuned to the Zeitgeist, becoming aware of the unfolding and expanding moral concerns of our species as they get to grips with the business of being human in a crowded world with so many opportunities to inflict hurt upon others.
Nothing illustrates the moving Zeitgeist better than the revolution that has happened over homosexuality. This has all happened in my lifetime. When I was a child homosexuals were persecuted and homosexual activity was punishable by law. In many parts of the world homosexuals are still persecuted and are often even executed. In Britain the first step was to legalize consenting sexual acts between men over the age of 21 in private. You may ask why women were not covered, the explanation is hilarious, Queen Victoria lacked the imagination to see what females could get up to and so struck out all references to women before she signed the law. Later the age was lowered to 18 and finally to achieve equality with heterosexuals it was lowered to 16. In addition homosexuals now have protection against discrimination in jobs and many services. Recently civil partnerships have been established which allow same sex couples to register their relationship and achieve the same legal rights as a spouse in a marriage. Within months of the changes there have been so many gay marriages that the media have stopped using quotation marks (even air quotes) around the terms gay marriage and gay wedding. There has even been a gay wedding on The Archers. Now that is mainstream.
The formal legal movement towards homosexual equality has moved faster than public opinion but in the same direction. Acceptance of homosexuality has grown enormously. Even the churches are nearly keeping pace. They call the moving Zeitgeist "The Holy Spirit", but then they would do, wouldn't they?
Religion has nothing more to offer the world. We are evolving a new morality without the help of religion, indeed religion and scriptural religion in particular can only get in the way. While the Bible can be read in different ways by the skilled preacher only a fool would expect to find biblical answers to problems which are totally beyond the imagination of anybody living in the first century. How can an interpretation of the words of Jesus tell us whether artificially boosting life expectancies of rich people is justified while clamouring for the poor to stop breeding or whether it is moral to leave the problems of climate change to the next generation or whether it is ever right to kill a person to end their suffering. The answers are not there. We will find the answers ourselves, through a slow process of summing opinions and coming to a consensus. The process is not strictly democratic as some voices are louder than others, some are much more coherent and some get an attentive audience even if they are delivered softly. But this is how we do things. This is how we decide that slavery is not on, that treating women as chattels is not on, that treating people differently because of the colour of their skin is not on, that persecuting homosexuals is not on.
In the future there will be new consensuses over new issues we may not be able to foresee. Perhaps this will see the dissolution of nation-states. Maybe the future will see an end to the tolerance of extreme wealth or extreme inequality in wealth just as we came to end the tolerance of slavery and the systematic denigration of women. Perhaps one day we will even decide no longer to tolerate religion.
Part 1: Christianity and the Death of Civilization
Atheism
Politics
Life
Feedback
Forum
Home