Tags
Religion permits evil deeds., Religious Darwinism., Social survival, Why we are permitted to kill.
What an outrageous statement for a title, “The function of religion is to shift responsibility for evil deeds to others.” We like to think and to believe that the religions of the world are a force for good, and that they give answers to the existential questions which bother thinking adults when they are young. Nearly all people by the time they reach middle age are comfortable with whatever answers they came up with for their personal needs for the existential conundrums. Generally those are unanswerable questions in a philosophical/religious sense, but are usually obvious in any empirical approach. When you die you are dead. There is no provable afterlife. Gods are created by men to provide acceptable answers to unpleasant realities. ETC.
Previously in this blog in the post, Natural and Supernatural Religion, it was concluded that, “Religion is about binding a reproductive community together.” In the post, “Striving toward a new meaning for human existence,” there was a quote from Winwood Reade, “truth is only a means toward an end—the welfare of the human race.” These ideas lay “bare and “raw” the function of religion, which is Darwinian in its outlook. The goal is simply the ongoing survival of a functioning organism and in this case it is a social organism formed of a community of people.
Social groups are bound together by various things, but those groups that do survive for a number of generations are confronted with existential problems which confound the personal morality demanded between the members of the group. With nation states for example it is permitted even required that members of the group, designated soldiers, are required to kill people of some opposing out-group. These same soldiers would be executed by the in-group for committing exactly the same actions against members of their own in-group. So, the religious commandments not to kill people really means not to kill our own in-group people and it’s okay to kill those whom our group’s leaders and our social group sanction. Morality is very similar to law; the main difference is that law is enforced by state with designated punishments and morality is enforced with the replacement of approval and acceptance with rejection and isolation.
The individual maintains acceptance within a society by being a good person, which means obeying its morals and laws. The law sometimes requires the individual to commit acts which are clearly against the morals and laws of the group, but when these actions are directed by the group and the laws of the group then they are okay and even required. The reason that these actions are okay for the individual is because the moral responsibility for the evil deed is shifted to others. In the short term it is shifted to the state, but the state represents the whole community of individuals and the way the community shifts the responsibility is by having a religion. The whole community can then shift the responsibility for their evil deeds to God. God spoke to them through their prophets and holy men and told them to do these evil things. We as individuals are sorry about the inconvenience it caused to you foreigners personally as individuals, but God told us this was the right thing to do – so we did it. We had no choice – God told us to do it. This process permits larger groups to survive for longer periods of time than personal morality applied to group problems. It is simple Darwinism, survival of the fittest, applied to social groups and to their religious institutions and it helps the people and their communities to survive.
Religion is a good thing because it allows bad things to be done to save the people.
Egads, I find this to be a complete moral inversion. Blah.There can’t be anything good about bad things being done. Ends can’t (ought not) justify means.
I totally agree with Steve’s sentiment from a personal moral perspective and its relation to other individuals whom he encounters, but nations and religions operate on a different morality. Their purpose is the survival of their group through many generations of its individual members and that means defending the group against everything. Occasionally that means deadly physical conflict, as in a war, with outside groups and their members. It is that abuse of outsiders, under certain conditions, which is permitted by religions and states. If any individual can not abide by those needs of his local state or religion he has declared himself an outsider and an enemy and may then suffer his organizations’ most violent abuse. Persons who declare themselves to be atheists thus become universally maligned even though they are perfect citizens in every other way to their local group.
The only exception I might acknowledge would be that of self-defense. It is allowed for a group to defend itself against the aggression against the group (Hun’s at the gate), but it is not allowed to be the aggressor against another group even if you think the survival of your group requires said aggression.
Bottom line: Evil deeds are by definition immoral and can not be justified even if sanctioned by some religion (which is just so much made-up mythology anyway). It just doesn’t work for a shaman to come out of his tent and declare that god came to him in a vision and told him that the tribe needs to attack the folks in the next valley to secure the survival of our tribe… ah, because we are god’s chosen people.
I agree with Steve again, but it is observed that cross-border attacks happen quite often and we must presume the attackers are moral people within their own group or those groups couldn’t be organized well enough to bring off an organized attack. The Germans and Japanese were considered honest and moral people before and after their attacks that started WW II, and the United Nations is usually considered a moral organization dedicated to peace, but these organizations do attack other groups and kill people. What I was doing with that blog was trying to state as clearly as possible why these organizations and their leaders were able to justify to themselves to their followers their obviously evil intentions and to sanction their vicious behaviors. They somehow had to shift the justification and moral responsibility off of their own personal self and people. Since conflicts and wars have been so common this appears to be easy to do. Perhaps human DNA does have a component that wants to suppress members of other groups of our own species especially when they are perceived as near equals and therefore a threat.