Happiness and Morality Happy and Moral without God

Introduction
Christianity is what is called a "revealed" religion, meaning that God revealed himself to man. In other religions man sought a deity and eventually found it, or thought he did. In the case of Christianity, God sought man and revealed himself to him. A book was even released that was said to have been dictated or inspired by God so that man might know his will, yet ever since mankind has been in some doubt as to what God meant when he said it. What was it God revealed to man? He did not reveal science. The whole structure of physical science was built up very gradually and tentatively by man. He did not teach him how to overcome disease, or its nature and cure. He did not teach man anything useful for his survival in the harsh environment he had created. Man had no revelation regarding the wheel, the steam engine, electricity and the light bulb, cars, or anything else that we consider indispensible to our civilization. He invented them, and in doing so, he behaved just as he might have behaved had he never heard of God at all. What was there left for God to give man? Well, it is said he gave him morality. He gave man the ten commandments. He told him he must not steal, he must not commit murder, he must not bear false witness; he told children they must honor their fathers and mothers, but somehow he forgot to mention that parents should also honor their children. He mixed up with these things with the command that people ought to honor him, and he was more insistent upon that than upon anything else. Not to honor him was the one unforgivable crime. Apparently, there was a need for an inspired morality, because without God moral laws would be without authority, and decency would disappear from human society. The idea that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society was countered by a study 1published in the US, in 2005. The author compared the social performance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. The study compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy and reported that: In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.
1

The study was published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, by Gregory Paul, a social scientist. He used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.

The conclusion the study reached, which is also the thesis of this paper, is simple: religion is not only unnecessary for a moral society, but it may also affect the well-being of the individuals.

Empirical proof
The notion that religion is a requisite for any high-functioning society, refuted by the above study, is also countered by numerous other studies and scientists. One of them is Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College whose research looks at the link between religion and societal health within the developed world. Zuckerman says the findings are consistent with his own data, collected for his 2008 book Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment2 - a portrait of secular society in Denmark and Sweden. Scandinavian countries, in particular, have achieved high levels of economic strength and social stability, and yet the influence of religion there is in steep decline, perhaps the lowest in recorded history. Coincidence or not, those countries also rank among the worlds happiest populations.3 Zuckerman believes that the secret of their success lies in the historically strong sense of community perhaps a survival response to long, harsh winters - that transcends religious life in these northern climates. Social well-being, economic strength (and happiness) are products of community interaction, not faith, Zuckerman conjectures. His conclusion, as that of Gregory Paul, is that societies do not need religion in order to prosper and that a moral society without God is entirely possible.

The Origin of Morality

Morality is the quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct or a system of ideas that fall into those same categories. Items that fall into the morally sound category are qualities like good, goodness, rightness, virtue, and righteousness. When talking about a moral quality involving a course of action, we think of ethics. To define morality, a person will use the rules or habits with regard to right and wrong that he or she follows. It is a complex system of general principles and particular judgments based on cultural, religious, and philosophical concepts and beliefs. Cultures and/or groups regulate and generalize these concepts, thus regulating behavior. When someone conforms to the codification, you consider this person to be moral. Denying the divine origin of morality is considered outrageous, even blasphemous, by many people. However, this point of view is far from being flawless. In an article

Zuckerman spent a year in Scandinavia and had in-depth talks with 150 Danes and Swedes about their religious beliefs. 3 According to the Map of World Happiness created Adrian White, Analytic Social Psychologist, University of Leicester (2006), Denmark is the happiest place on Earth. White used the responses of 80,000 people worldwide to map out subjective wellbeing, as well as data published by UNESCO, the New Economics Foundation, the CIA and the UN Human Development Report. This information is also supported by The Netherlands Erasmus University Rotterdams annual World Database of Happiness.

entitled Godless Morality, published on the Project Syndicate website, Marc Hauser4 and Peter Singer5 present only three of the many arguments against divine inspired morality.

Firstly, simultaneously claiming that God is good and that he gave us our sense of good and bad is a tautology. We are simply saying that God meets Gods standards. Secondly, there are no moral principles that are shared by all believers, but are rejected by non-believers. Atheists and agnostics are not less moral than religious believers, even though their acts of kindness rest on different principles. Non-believers often have as strong and sound a sense of right and wrong as anyone, and have worked to abolish slavery and contributed to other efforts to alleviate human suffering. The opposite is also true. Religion is responsible for countless carnages throughout history, from Gods command to Moses to slaughter the Midianites men, women, boys, and non-virginal girls through the Crusades, the Inquisition, innumerable conflicts between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and suicide bombers convinced that martyrdom will lead them to paradise. Also, Christians have traditionally imposed unfair restrictions on the rights of women, and they supported slavery through most of the religion's history. Thirdly, some elements of morality seem to be universal, despite sharp doctrinal differences among the worlds major religions. In fact, these elements extend even to cultures like China, where religion is less significant than philosophical outlooks like Confucianism. Hauser and Singer argue that morality is not of divine, but rather of natural origin. They believe that over millions of years we have evolved a moral faculty that generates intuitions about right and wrong, and proposed a simple test to demonstrate this. They posted three moral dilemmas on a website (http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/) and three possible answers that could fit any of them.6 Out of all the subjects from around the world that took this test, both believers and non-believers, over 90% gave the same answers. When asked to justify their answers, both religious subjects and atheists were either clueless or incoherent. These studies provide empirical support for the idea that, like other psychological faculties of the mind, including language and mathematics, we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong. These intuitions reflect the outcome of millions of years in which our ancestors have lived as social mammals, and are part of our common inheritance.
4

Marc Hauser (born 25 October 1959) is Professor of Psychology and Director of Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Harvard University. 5 Peter Singer (born 6 July 1946) is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. 6 The subjects were asked whether it was permissible, obligatory or forbidden to act in a certain way in a given situation. Ex: You pass by a small child drowning in a shallow pond, and you are the only one around. If you pick up the child, she will survive and your pants will be ruined. Picking up the child is _

Our evolved intuitions do not necessarily give us the right or consistent answers to moral dilemmas. What was good for our ancestors may not be good today. But insights into the changing moral landscape, in which issues like animal rights, abortion, euthanasia, and international aid have come to the fore, have not come from religion, but from careful reflection on humanity and what we consider a life well lived. The idea that our morality is the product of evolution rather than being inspired by God is supported by numerous other scientists. This paper will further present the opinions of Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley. In his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins7 supports the idea that morality can exist without religion. He claims that our morality has a Darwinian explanation: altruistic genes, selected through the process of evolution, give people natural empathy. Dawkins asks whether a sane person would commit murder, rape or robbery if he or she knew that no God existed; the answer is, obviously, no. This undermines the belief that religion is needed to make us behave morally. In support of this view, he surveys the history of morality, arguing that there is a moral Zeitgeist that continually evolves in society, generally progressing toward liberalism. As it progresses, this moral consensus influences how religious leaders interpret their holy writings. Thus, Dawkins states, morality does not originate from the Bible, rather our moral progress informs what part of the Bible Christians accept and what they now dismiss. Matt Ridley 8 also supports the idea that morality is a product of evolution. In his book, The origins of virtue, he explains how the human mind has evolved a special instinct for social exchange, offering a lucid and persuasive argument about the paradox of human benevolence. The paradox consist in the fact that our minds have been build by selfish genes to be social, trustworthy and co-operative. Ridley claims we owe our success as a species to these social instincts and explains that morality is the stuff society is made of. In short his argument goes like this: Society is important because it allows for division of labor. It allows for people to specialize. And the sums of all our specialized efforts are greater than they would be if we all had been generalists. In other words: society is a synergy between specialists. In order to have a harmonious society, we have to be well-connected to each other. This requires us to be co-operative, social and trustworthy. Being social, co-operative and trustworthy is a way to thrive and thereby an evolutionary advantage. These traits are built into our nature by evolution.

Clinton Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and was a fellow of New College, Oxford. 8 Matthew White Ridley (born 7 February 1958) is an English journalist, science writer, and businessman.

Religion versus Morality

Religion is not the root of morality; it is an obstacle that hinders mans pursuit of happiness, an obstacle produced by mans imagination no less. It was his first attempt to understand the world around him. Some people, like the French sociologist mile Durkheim, thought that religious rationality would wither away in modern times (for him, the early twentieth century) because scientific rationality would replace it, by virtue of its superior explanatory power. Alas, it did not. In an article entitled Religion and Morality: A Contradiction Explained, Timothy Shortell9 argued that morality in any form is totally incompatible with religion. He believes that faith is a child-like rationality and, therefore, that those who are religious are incapable of moral action, just as children are. To be moral requires that one accept full responsibility for one's self. Morality is based on scientific rationality. In order to act in the world as an adult, one must be able to recognize that the world is structured and the situatedness of all individual action. The choices that present themselves in the course of day-to-day living are influenced by social forces (which is why we need theory). Morality is a basis for making choices, in the context of a particular political economy. Faith, like superstition, prevents moral action. Those who fail to understand how the world works, who, in place of an understanding of the interaction between self and environment, see only the saved and the damned, demons and angels, miracles and curses, will be incapable of informed choice. They will be unable to take responsibility for their actions because they lack intellectual and emotional maturity. This is why Friedrich Nietzsche hated Christianity so much. Nietzsche despised weakness. He did not think of weakness primarily in terms of physical strength. Rather, he was referring to quality of character. He also despised Christianity for emphasizing the wrong values for mankind, preferring a herd mentality and false morality to strength, individual genius, and honesty. As a religion, Nietzsche felt Christianity is inimical to truth-seeking, scientific inquiry, and sensuality; it replaced these values with blind faith, self-deception, and morbid piety. To criticize Christianitys alleged humanitarian side, Nietzsche explained how Christianitys survival and fundamental principals relied on humanitys complete disregard for their own survival. The Beatitudes, for instance, call people to give of themselves and to put others before themselves, denying life itself if necessary. For Nietzsche this was against human nature. Christianity called humans to halt natural
9

Timothy Shortell is an associate professor of sociology at the City University of New York, known for his vehement criticism of religion, especially Christianity, and of the administration of President George W. Bush.

human progress for spiritual advancement. That the spiritual realm did not exist added insult to the injury of evolutionary stalling caused by Christianitys ideas. Nietzsche sees Christianity as a religion steeped in sickness, weakness, and illness: for him, Christian values are the most unhealthy of any religion or philosophy. Christianity, in fact, often points to the body and its senses as things to be reviled; the body becomes merely a site for temptations, and the senses mere mechanisms for triggering the temptation process. If the soul is the vehicle into heaven, then the Christian body is the vehicle into sin. For Nietzsche, this anti-sensuality in Christian thought can only lead to self-loathing and unhappiness. In his most fiery rebuttal of Christianity, The Antichrist, he writes : Christianity . . . is the hatred of the spirit, of pride, courage, freedom, liberty of the spirit; Christian is the hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy itself. In a similar vein, he writes in Beyond Good and Evil: The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, a self-derision, and selfmutilation.

Conclusion
The vast majority of religious people believe that without God, our society would fall apart, disintegrate into chaos, anarchy and immorality. They also believe that our morality comes from God and dismiss any other source as blasphemy. This paper sought, and hopefully managed, to prove this point of view is fallacious and unfounded, by providing both theoretical and empirical arguments. Firstly, a secular society is not a utopia, it is already happening. People in Denmark, Sweden and Norway live a normal, happy life in a perfectly functioning, thriving society. They are also the least devout countries in the world. Secondly, religion may actually be harmful to the well-being of a society, since it promotes hateful attitudes bigotry, intolerance, etc. High rates of belief also correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion. Thirdly, the fact that morality is not a product of religion, but of evolution, is consistent with the facts of biology and geology. Human beings became moral out of the need to adapt to their hostile environment. They realized that only by cooperating and trusting each other can they hope to survive and thrive. This is why universal moral principles exist, accepted by both believers and non-believers. Lastly, Christianity stands against human nature, and against the progress and happiness of humankind. It supports values that weaken and enslave the individual.

References
Societies worse off when they have God on their side article by Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent in The Times, 27 September 2005,

Who needs God when Weve got Mammon - article by David Villano on MillerMcCune website, 24 November 2009 The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, 2006 The Origin of Virtue by Matt Ridley, 1997 Religion and Morality A Contradiction Explained by Timothy Shortell Godless Morality by Marc Hauser and Peter Singer, on Project Syndicate website, 4 January 2006 The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche