Comment by mahogany
5 years ago
> Public morality cannot be maintained without religion
Do you have evidence or arguments for this, or is this just a feeling? I can see an argument for the statement "religion can be and has been used to maintain public morality" but that's not what you said, so I'm curious about your reasoning.
What is morality? It is not a physical material phenomenon and it is not scientific, so if it exists it is by definition supernatural or its synonym metaphysical
Once you are discussing the supernatural, you are discussing religion.
Since the topic of this thread is about church membership, I would assume religion in this context refers to organized religion, rather than such an abstract definition, in which case someone can believe in the supernatural without being religious.
But in either case, I'm a little confused. Wouldn't this line of reasoning apply to laws as well? They aren't physical or (necessarily) scientific. And are you saying that any study of metaphysics is necessarily religious in nature? Perhaps we are using different definitions of religion.
If you are making an argument that notions of morality do not (or did not) arise from science, or that morality arose from religion, I think that would have weight to it. But that also doesn't imply that morality cannot continue to exist without religion. For example, it's plausible to me that a sense of shared community is something that can "maintain morality" in a society. We may have lost a sense of community in part due to the decline of churches, but I don't see why it would require them to exist.
I have not heard a convincing argument that true right or wrong can exists outside of a universe with a monotheistic God.
Do you believe you morality is more right than a Nazis or a pedophiles?
If so, you need a justification of why your morality is more ultimately correct and truly "good and better." I have not heard a convincing one that ultimately doesn't end in a monotheistic God.
And if not, what are we even doing in this conversation? There can be no moral progress without an objectively better standard that we are attempting to discover.