religion and claiming the moral high-ground

[miriam_e]

Good grief! I get so sick of religious people waffling on about how their religion is the source of morality and that their religion is what makes people good. It completely ignores the large number of good and moral atheists and it certainly doesn't take account of the many hateful religious people crowding this little planet.

I have lost count of the number of religious people who in honest perplexity have remarked to me that they don't understand how I can be a good person with a deeply held sense of altruism when I have absolutely no religious beliefs at all. It makes me shake my head in despair sometimes.

Why do people think that people should be good simply because some misguided superstition says they should? Why can't they accept that it simply makes good sense to help others?

Altruism just is the most logical way co-exist with your fellow humans.

Comments

[patchworkkid.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. The problem, I think, is the population level. You see this kind of thing mirrored in animal populations that grow too large as well: they turn on each other, aggression levels remain steadily high, sexual perversity ramps up, the list goes on and on. Lyall Watson went into it in some depth in Supernature, which I really have to read again.

That said you'd think that anyone who thought about it, thought about what's made them feel great in the past and did the math concerning their own future... you'd think they'd realise that, yeah, altruism is actually a pretty smart move. And it would be, if everyone would play it. Otherwise you get taken advantage of, feel like a sucker, become resentful, and never do it again. And you become part of the problem just like everyone else.

Which comes back to population again. With a small population when someone behave selfishly, they get slapped. They pay a price. Their whole social world lets them know that what they did was pretty crap. Not so when your social world consists of hundreds of thousands of people.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Your reply makes a number of interesting points.

The thing about crowding leading to more misdirected behavior doesn't seem to be as simple as had been originally thought. We have a number of unconscious strategies to avoid confrontation when we are squeezed closer together. As a dramatic example, note what happens when people enter an elevator in the company of several others. Everybody falls quiet, or speaks in nearly whispered murmurs, and nobody, except closest friends look each other in the eye. When they leave the elevator people's conversations start again and at normal volume. We quite unconsciously do things to protect each other from aggression developing.

When you look at aggression in the wider population, it seems to be going down rather than up. The main drivers of aggression and crime would appear to be wealth disparity and health. This doesn't explain why some of the richest individuals are some of the most dangerous, but I think that is a separate issue. Isolation from the rest of society can lead to a disconnect and lack of empathy, and if the individual concerned has developed their wealth through sociopathic tendencies then it is worsened. And there has been some research recently on how big organisations and the drive to wealth seem to be selecting for sociopathy, but they are only a tiny part of society. Most people seem to be becoming more altruistic and responsible.

I am completely at a loss as to how to explain sexual perversity. I grew up in the country and spent much of my time blissfully alone in the bush, but I got a good helping of sexual perversity. That has faded somewhat over time, but is still present even though I'm living completely alone in the bush again. I used to think it was related to maturity (I've always felt much, much younger and more mentally immature than I physically am) but now am coming to believe that it is a part of every human and has been since our species' early days. It is just that most people won't admit it, even to themselves.

Your point about the problem of con-artists surviving more easily in larger populations is very interesting. It is true... but other forces more than offset it. There has been a lot of research into why most people will help others even though they will never see that person again. This is one of the things that makes me very hopeful for the human race. We are growing up to become a marvellous species... if we don't wreck things first.