Religion and Moral Behavior

Jerry Muller’s excellent Public Interest article, linked by Hume, references the ubiquitous “social utility” argument for religion: “belief in ultimate reward and punishment leads men to act morally.” The disappearance of religious belief, religion advocates argue, will produce individual and collective moral decay. “Where atheism and agnosticism flourish,” writes Michael Novak in his latest book, “one may expect to find a certain . . . slacking off, a certain habit of getting away with things” (268). It has even been suggested that the subprime crisis was brought on by the “secularizing” of the United States, as epitomized by Americans’ alleged unwillingness to say “Merry Christmas.”

Secular conservatives take most such charges seriously. They appreciate the fragility of social order and understand how complex are the myriad norms that maintain respect for common decencies and the rule of law.

That having been said, it seems to me that a rough survey of the evidence does not necessarily bear out the warnings that waning religiosity encourages moral decadence. Northern European countries are among the most secular in the world. Here’s a thought experiment: Where would a contract to build a highway, say, stand a better chance of fulfillment free from corruption and bribes: Sweden or Mexico? Where is the risk higher that the construction firm’s CEO will be kidnapped and held for ransom: in Sweden or Mexico? Where is the CEO more likely to pay his taxes?

The incidence of secular humanists in Sub-Saharan Africa is undoubtedly a fraction of that in Scandinavia. If you want to run a business or raise a family free from the fear of violence, you’re better off in Scandinavia.

Religion advocates point to the much higher religiosity of the United States compared to Europe as proof of America’s moral superiority. Belief in the divine origin of the 6th Commandment apparently does not do much to restrain behavior, however, since American murder rates are magnitudes higher than Europe’s. Denmark, Sweden and Norway have among the lowest murder rates in the world, despite their populations’ infrequent church attendance. Within the United States, violent crime is highest in red states, with their higher degrees of religiosity, than in blue states.

Religious belief does not reliably inoculate against other social pathologies. The black illegitimacy rate in the U.S. is nearly 70%, despite blacks’ Biblically-inspired social conservatism. Catching up quickly are the country’s heavily Catholic Hispanics, who now have a 50% illegitimacy rate. Unwed teen pregnancy in Europe is a fraction of what it is in the United States. Bible Belt states such as Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Mississippi have the highest divorce rates in the country, Massachusetts the lowest. Sub-Saharan Africa’s religious zeal—whether Christian, Muslim, or pantheistic—has not inhibited rampant AIDS transmission there.

But perhaps Oslo or Newton, Mass., are simply living off of the legacy of religious culture. Michael Novak asserts that “widespread public atheism” takes three to four generations to show its full effects (how he arrived at that interval is unclear) (52). But even if the “full” effects of atheism are not apparent until “three to four generations,” some moral decay should show up before that. The main signs of European moral decline that conservative religion proponents have come up with are the unpopularity of the Iraq War and the continent’s low birth rate. This first piece of evidence is a curious one, since the Holy See itself was no war enthusiast. The Vatican’s foreign minister declared in March 2003 that a unilateral military strike by the U.S. would be a “crime against peace.” As for low birth rates, it is debatable that a patriarchal Palestinian family with eight children occupies a higher moral plane than an Italian or English family with one child. Affluence and women’s liberation ineluctably push birth rates down. This is a demographic issue, not a moral one.

Now it is undoubtedly the case that the influences on violence and other social dysfunction in highly religious countries are enormously complicated. At the very least, more complicated than the assertion that religious belief is the sine qua non of moral behavior.

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The varieties of conservatism

Jerry Muller, the author of Conservatism, has given me permission to reprint an article of his that might be of interest to readers of this website, “Dilemmas of Conservatism,” The Public Interest Number 139, Spring, 2000. Continue reading

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The Secular Right on controversial issues

In my previous post, Who are the Secular Right?, I focused on demographic differences between the Secular Right, Secular Left and Religious Right.  Using the same methodology in that post, I will now shift a bit more to controversial issues, as opposed to demographics.  My general rationale for these sorts of surveys is to assess the diversity of belief (or lack of) among people who can be considered of a class.  Note for example that on some issues those who are secularists tend to agree, while in other cases those who are of the same political inclination (e.g., those on the Right, whether secular or religious) tend to agree. On many social issues the Secular Right charts the waters between the Religious Right and Secular Left.

Continue reading

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A secularist’s thoughts on Thanksgiving

Michael Novak recently asked me: “Am I right in saying that atheists have no one to thank, [unlike] Jews and Christians [who] do thank and praise God for so many good things?” In light of our national holiday tomorrow, I thought I would take up his question here.

The problem for the nonbeliever is not that there is no one to thank for our good fortune but that there are more targets of gratitude than we can possibly acknowledge.

God does have the advantage of being a centralized receptacle for thanks, but is otherwise quite flawed as an object of gratitude, in my view.

I am indebted every day to human ingenuity that I could not possibly replicate on my own. I live on the 15th floor of an apartment building—a remarkable situation! Within this marvel of engineering, I have electricity, clean water, protection from the elements, and now, the internet, that miracle of knowledge aggregation that gives individuals more power than anyone has ever before possessed. Humans created all these wonders through tireless, loving, and patient empirical observation and experimentation.

I give thanks for the centuries-long development of limited government and to our Founding Fathers who created the most flexible and stable written constitution yet devised. As a secular conservative, I am particularly grateful for the free market system that supplies America’s cornucopia of goodies, an accomplishment that the current financial crisis in no way discredits.

But there are elements of my good fortune that are not the product of human effort—such as the facts that I a citizen of the United States and not, say, the Congo; that I was born with a sound body; and that the laws of nature work as they do. Do I need a God to account for those windfalls? In the first two cases, definitely not. I accept without discomfort the massive role of randomness in the distribution of benefits and handicaps; the alternative—that they represent deliberate judgment–is too horrible to contemplate. Were I to thank God for my extreme luck in being born into a society where people do not routinely massacre each other, I would have to explain why I deserve this happy outcome, whereas those millions of individuals who are not so fortunate in their birthplace do not. Likewise, if God is responsible for my healthy physical constitution, I would have to explain why he allows thousands of innocent children to be born with painful and sometimes fatal birth defects while sparing me.

Coming up with such explanations, in my view, requires either narcissism or the torture of reason. Most believers seem oblivious to the solipsism entailed by their thanking God when their cancer goes into remission, say. But the problem remains: Why did God save you and let the patient in the bed next to you die? The results are no more satisfactory when a conscious effort is made to supply rationales for such disparate outcomes. Typical candidates include: It is actually a gift from God to be born with half a brain, you just lack the capacity to understand his mysterious ways; or, how dare you presume to judge him, you cringing worm?

As for the fact that we live in a universe of extraordinary precision and regularity, I cannot begin to explain how that came to pass. And neither can the religious, other than by a fiat without any empirical backing. I trust that science will gradually push back the limits of our ignorance, but it may be that such matters are beyond human understanding.

Tomorrow, however, we can all be grateful for the wondrous stability and prosperity of America, and for the fact that we live in a society where people no longer kill each other for their religious beliefs or lack thereof. 

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Using my real name

Having put up a few posts under my real name already, I should introduce myself. Mine may be a familiar byline to some of you who follow issues of law and litigation; my main blog is Overlawyered, where I just did a post inviting readers to check out Secular Right. My leanings are more to the libertarian side (though conservative by libertarian standards) with some “Center-Right” thrown in. I’ve written for many well-known conservative periodicals and for a while did a column for Reason, where I explored frictions between religious and secular forces on the right here, here, and here, for example.

I am fascinated by the skill that some elements of the religious conservative movement have shown in adapting for their own use the paraphernalia of identity politics: the cultivation of a sense of being besieged and persecuted, the hair-trigger sensitivity to disrespect, the litigious legal defense groups, and so forth. Under it all, of course, may lurk genuine grievances, just as the identity blocs cultivated by the left also proffer some legitimate complaints worthy of redress. But it’s very different from the frame of mind associated until fairly recently with the conservative movement.

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End of Science

My cosmology post of earlier today brought in the inevitable end-of-science proponent.  Got that covered.

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“Defamation of religions” at the United Nations

As Canada’s National Post reports, they’re still at it:

Islamic countries Monday won United Nations backing for an anti-blasphemy measure Canada and other Western critics say risks being used to limit freedom of speech.

Combating Defamation of Religions passed 85 –50 with 42 abstentions in a key UN General Assembly committee, and will enter into the international record after an expected rubber stamp by the plenary later in the year.

This isn’t the first time around for these resolutions, which, as the Ottawa Citizen explains, tend to be backed by many of the world’s most intolerant states. Eugene Volokh discussed the resolutions earlier this year in this and this post, citing last year’s General Assembly vote as “95-52, with nearly all the developed countries voted against.” It doesn’t look as if proponents are increasing their strength.

Say what you will about the major Religious Right groups in the U.S., they’ve mostly come down strongly on the right side of this particular issue. The National Post account quotes Bennett Graham, international program director with the religious-litigation strike force Becket Fund, as saying of the resolution, “It provides international cover for domestic anti-blasphemy laws, and there are a number of people who are in prison today because they have been accused of committing blasphemy.”

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On debates to have….

In response to comments, I will state beforehand that I won’t be discussing the existence of God or Creationism much.  Evolution is true.  I would just as rather discuss the validity of Newtonianism, Astrology, the molecule or phlogistan.  In other words, evolution is one of those things where I have a very high degree of certitude as to whether it is true or not, such that I feel ridiculous wasting my finite life discussing its truth or not.  As for God, the only times I have “converted” people to my own position, and through no conscious intent I might add, was through my example as a well adjusted person who needed no supernatural grounding for ethical behavior or happiness.  I don’t think discussing the merits of presuppositions is generally very fruitful.  I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I’m understandably the sort who is very fixated on useful allocation of my discretionary time.  If you want arguments about God and Darwin, you won’t get them from me….

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I Am Who I Am

As a follow up to John’s post clarifying his identity, it’s no secret to anyone who has noted my unartful charts that I am Razib Khan. I chose “David Hume” as my identity because I think with the religious grounding of the modern American Right people often forget the secular individuals who are part of the tradition’s intellectual lineage, e.g., F. A. Hayek, and the aforementioned H. L. Mencken.  My normal brief is life science, and I have very little interest in commenting too much on contemporary politics. But, I do consider myself on the Right, and as you can see I have a fixation on using the GSS to clarify opinions on social issues. Far too many believe they can introspect and extrapolate from their own reasoning to others, and that leads to error.  Finally, I would like to add a quick “cut-out” which distills some of my thinking on the various taxa being discussed here:

The Secular Left asks, why not?

The Secular Right asks, why?

The Religious Left demands that we should, “Because god wills it!”

The Religious Right asserts that we can’t, “Because god forbids it!”

These are admittedly cut-outs. My point is that human psychology is at the root of our reasoning.  That psychology emerges from a synthesis of innate presuppositions, socialization and random-acts-of-fate. Most people who believe X may believe Y, but we need to keep in mind the residual. To a great extent, the Secular Right is a residual, if not a trivial one. Most of the non-religious are on the Left.

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Settling In

Someone has asked me why I am contributing under a pen-name, since the first thing I did was to tell the whole world who I am.

Heck, I don’t know.  I thought it would be neat to have a pen-name.  I had some vague ideas about anonymity, too.  As soon as I started blogging, though, I realized that I would not be able to resist linking to a lot of my own stuff; and in any case, friends tell me my style is unmistakable.  So I guess there wasn’t much point.

Walter has pointed out the downsides of blogging under a pen-name:

  • Reader confusion.
  • Lack of recognition for one’s work.
  • The blogosphere’s general devaluing of anonymous commentary.
  • Giving one’s opponents an opening to hint that one is hiding something.

 

I guess he’s right.  Having started out as Bradlaugh, though, I shall continue until some negative consequence ensues, then rethink.  It’s nice, in any case, to give a little publicity to Bradlaugh, beneath whose statue the teenage me learned to smoke cigarettes.

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