leekburn t1_jdzmdw0 wrote on March 28, 2023 at 10:56 AM

Reply to comment by Efficient-Squash5055 in Seeing Through Kant and Bentham and Arguing the Moral Question of Saving Lives by adarsh_badri

What about religion?

Efficient-Squash5055 t1_jdzwjqd wrote on March 28, 2023 at 12:37 PM

I think there’s a pretty wide diversity of religion; ranging from quite fundamental, toleration, abusive, ignorant, and violent sects, to very helpful, community oriented sects.

In that regard, I think a person who seeks a religion, either seeks one which matches their own heart (alignment to compassion/love; or one with mis-alignment to compassion/love) or otherwise are simply born into it and are consumed in the fundamental ideology and for lack of a better term “programmed” to see only that version of reality.

I don’t think religion it’s self is a compass for moral rightness; but that people with moral rightness (people having the innate sense of moral rightness from genuine compassion/love) is the compass.

A mother holding her new-born, an elderly man tending to his sick beloved dog; share universal attributes in that love; compassion, empathetic sensitivity, innate desire to serve the other, an automatic valuing of the others innate worth; and from these qualities come a wisdom of right moral action.

And of course anyone who has developed a visceral state of alignment to that particular state of consciousness.

The positively religiously oriented may attribute that love to Jesus (or fill in the blank) and I pick no bones about that; though love is not an abstraction, or a 2000 year old story, or a “belief”; it’s a here and now available state of consciousness to develop alignment with.

Any religion without that of course has no moral compass regardless.

leekburn t1_je4t8d9 wrote on March 29, 2023 at 12:46 PM

So you believe that the religion that someone chooses to identify with is one that already closely aligns to the moral compass that they already have inside of them? Kinda like putting a label on your morals and beliefs?

Efficient-Squash5055 t1_je4zzey wrote on March 29, 2023 at 1:40 PM

Yea I think so. Well to the extent that one seeks a religion after childhood, you know after the stage we are indoctrinated by everything around us in early years.

As obviously there is the dynamic that kids will adopt predominant cultural beliefs as their own; which is why 99.9 percent of middle eastern children identify as Islam in adulthood (as example).

Though if one was neutral or ambivalent on the subject until adulthood and began looking for a “higher power”- I’m pretty sure they will seek a sect which allows them to be who they already are. Someone geared toward hateful thinking, vengeful punitive thinking would no doubt align to the more negative barbaric religions with a “cause”. I’m remembering all the westerners who subscribed to sharia law and negative forms of Islam through the past age of “terrorism”.

They found a “higher power” that gave them authority to be who they already were. Likewise a person largely compassionate/forgiving by nature would never accept such a “higher power”.