The Religious Lobby, Creating Decent Citizens: Why, and How

Most of my readers know that I'm an atheist (even if not an "evangelical" one); I have posted about it often.  (I'll insert a link when I find the posts.)  I have long maintained that people are naturally moral; in other words, you don't need a supernatural disciplinarian to keep you in line.  Of course, there will be a large minority (I used to think) that would have no compunctions about hurting their fellow-man and the world at large, for fun and profit, but the typical human being (so I said) would naturally tend to do the right thing.

Well.  Let it not be said that I can't see the obvious.  In recent months we have seen some eye-openers.  We have seen those who have deliberately refused to do the right thing.  We have seen those who have abused the offices to which they were elected in order to promote their own ends.  We have seen those who have victimised numerous people steadily throughout the years, just for their personal satisfaction.  We have heard people lying about their past in order to be elected to office.

Of course there have been more subtle sins, such as reneging on election promises, gratuitously aggravating foreign governments, exacerbating the existing disparity between the economic conditions of various sectors of the population, and encouraging the expression of mean-spiritedness in those who do not know any better.  But this can be put down to a sort of ignorance.  But the behaviour mentioned earlier is unforgivable.  So we have both immorality due to a sort of moral myopia, a kind of inability to understand moral issues, and certainly an inability to think through the consequences of certain actions that are clearly immoral to the rest of us, on one hand, as well as a deliberate turning away from actions that are unquestionably immoral.

In sum, I have to give up on considering that morality is innate in people; that they're born knowing to do the right thing.  But the opposite extreme is to assert that only religious teaching can create a moral individual.

Interestingly enough, it is often those who are political conservatives who are most anxious to bring people to religion, and (something that's puzzling) who are eager to punish, or call down divine retribution upon, those who are atheists or agnostics.  (So members of the present administration who are not particularly religious must maintain a facade of religiosity in order to appease the religious police, but it seems that the religious police is extremely tolerant of the practices of their close friends.)

Why is this?  From a cynical point of view, it seems that conservative Christians want everyone else to be kind and gentle and religious, while giving themselves the license to be ruthless when necessary.

Coming back to the question of morality being innate or not, I grant that certain values must be imparted to a child before it can become a moral individual.  These need not be religious values; they simply need to be human values; this was recognised long ago, when the Humanist movement started.  Arguably Humanism is many millennia old; some eastern religions are simply Humanism in eastern garb.  The basic ideas of fairness and justice and kindness are probably self-evident to children; they will often challenge their parents if they sense unfair actions.  But to blend ideas of fairness and kindness with reason and responsibility, to consider the long view, to support the idea that the highest morality implies a degree of self-negation, that requires additional effort, and requires that the child respects and even admires the adult.  This is a tall order, and almost the opposite of the situation where morality is innate.

Well, it is inappropriate to reject a long-held belief because of a few examples that appear to contradict them.  We must beware of flip-flopping too easily.  So I'm going to assume that morality exists among the members of the Administration, but that it is being suppressed in favour of political expedience.

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