Free Thinkers?
We like to think that we are decent and upright people, who uphold high principles and do the right thing by ourselves and by others.
We say we are thinking people who form our own consciences, and need to be free to decide for ourselves what is right and what is not.
We say we are independent and do not like being dictated to by authority, wherever it comes from, even from God, although we may not say this so bluntly.
In fact, some of us may even tell ourselves that God is a figment of deluded minds, and that religion is little more than a system for keeping people under control, or for helping the simple-minded to cope with the problems and difficulties that life throws up at them.
As for moral norms, we often say that these are socially engineered, and are at best appropriate to particular situations. They do not necessarily apply any more when newer situations and challenges arise. In short, many declare that morals are relative to circumstances. There are no absolutes.
Mulling things over
Let us stop for a while and mull things over.
For starters, let us listen to what Professor Max Charlesworth had to say some years ago at the University of Western Australia during a talk on:
Some things are true whether we think so or not.
Some things are good whether they suit our interests or not.
Some things are just, whether or not they go counter to what we immediately want.
Some things are beautiful whether we happen to like them or not.
Some things are sacred whether we are willing to recognise them or not.
What do you say?
Can there be any valid moral standards at all, if the human is no more than a chance phenomenon destined for oblivion, and whose material substance would be duly recycled through the ecosystem?
If such is the case, the honestly secular rational view should be that human morals are illusory, though perhaps useful social constructs, and that there should be no call for moral indignation in the event of the recycling process being expedited through acts of volition, violence or neglect. So why get hot under the collar or jump up and down in the event of murder, genocide, rape, violation of human rights, etc.? These may be uncomfortable for the recipients, but would be neither right nor wrong of themselves. It's all in the mind!
What do you think?
Implications
This impels us to concede two things:
Moral sense could only have validity if there is a spiritual principle in the human, a principle that transcends the limitations of recyclable matter, one which is immaterial and therefore not subject to the consequences of bodily death and breakdown.
Moreover, morality implies not an inanimate something, or a value which is impugned and insulted through non-moral behaviour, but Some One, exterior to and beyond the human and to whom the human is accountable.
Some religions believe in an exact balancing and carry-over from this life into a next. The good and the wrong-doing an individual commits in one existence determines his/her state when next reborn. Yet, accountability cannot be to an inexorable law, an automaton, a force or an abstraction, but only to Who Is.
But, to admit to the existence of Some One Who Is is to find oneself at the very heart of religious belief.
Without such an entity all moral concepts are merely ones of convenience. Nothing is morally right, nothing is morally wrong. Everything is maya, illusion.
If there are moral and spiritual dimensions to the human to ignore them would be irresponsible. To admit of these is to require entry into the realm of religion, belief and action.