I enjoy Nicky Campbell's religious discussion program on BBC on Sunday mornings ('The Big Questions'). Last Sunday they were discussing the question: "Is religion good for children?".
Some interesting thoughts arose from it, but one thing that jumped out at me was the often repeated views of religious people that if you don't believe in God you can't have any moral framework. The thought being, I suppose, that if you have no Bible or Koran you have no rule book to work to. They then take the logic a step further and say that if you have no rule book your behaviour deteriorates in to some sort of animal like behaviour, anarchism and ultimately social breakdown. One contributor said (in what the philosophers call a Post Hoc fallacy) that the London Riots last year proved that the schools need to be taught religion. A gentleman described as a Christian Evangelist stated that you can only get "true ethics" from the Bible. Another contributor amusingly claimed that if you don't have a religious belief you would wake up each day and arbitrarily choose a different ethical behaviour.
All these folks are trapped in a absolutist view point. However, Humanists take a relativistic view of morality. We judge the 'rightness' of an action based on the outcomes and how they affect people. The underlying principle is that we want the kind of world that we want to live in, and therefore we are looking for outcomes in terms of human happiness, personal fulfilment, a clean and safe world etc. In other words: "Do as you would be done by".(The Golden Rule that has been around for 4,000 years).
Not only is this a valid framework for an personal moral code, but it is far better that the absolutist codes based on ancient manuscripts, and I would suggest most people - even most religious people - actually believe this. I will elaborate on this in the next post. Watch this space...
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