And where were you educated?

I think I learned it by reading mystery novels.

What kind of church are they going to? The Episcopalians taught me that killing is wrong, but I don’t remember them emphasizing that it is illegal.

Those who believe they learned their ethics/morality from Christian churches often see morality as a list of things not to do (or to do). And no justification for such a rule (other than it was commanded by God) is given

Growing up in a non-christian/non-relegious household, I was taught that people were worthy of being treated with dignity and not killing someone what derived from that basic premise.

“Those who believe they learned their ethics/morality from Christian churches often see morality as a list of things not to do (or to do). And no justification for such a rule (other than it was commanded by God) is given”

Just so, and that’s the problem with religion-based morality (well one of the problems) which is why it is so perennially irritating to hear ‘relgious leaders’ referred to as if they were especially qualified to speak on moral questions. The reality is they’re especially disqualified.

One of my earliest memories is from when my family moved to Ireland for 6 months, when I was about 3-4 years old. When we drove up to my grandmother’s house, I saw that she had chickens, and I raced after the baby chickens because I had to touch one. Well, I caught one, and I touched it a little too hard – I basically squeezed it to death in my chubby 3 year old hands. This memory is so vivid because I remember how horrible I felt when I realized that this little chicken wasn’t going to run around any more, or grow up and lay eggs. So I guess I would say I learned that God doesn’t want us to kill at church, but I learned that killing was wrong on my grandmother’s farm in Tuam.

Panjack is misinformed about Christianity and the Christian approach to morality – as are some who self-identify as Christians.

All Christian morality grows out of love of certain kinds.

The basic expression of love is love of God expressed in the Jewish Torah text of Deuteronomy – the Shema. In a nut shell this is the command to love God and teach your children to love God too.

Jewish tradition at the time of Christ emphasized a system of laws – religious based dos and don’ts – which to a Christian is missing the point of love (no adverse reflection on Jews, then or today, intended).

When Christ was asked by a religious lawyer as to which commandment was the greatest, this was supposed to be a trick question – the reason being the proposition that if all law comes from God, then all law must be equal in greatness and emphasis.

Christ responded by stating that the first commandment is to love God and that the second commandment, equal to the first, is to love your neighbor as yourself. Christ was then asked who is your neighbor and he responded – essentially everyone whether you like them or not.

Now, this commandment to love others more than yourself is a challenge to put aside the ultimate hubris – selfishness. It is selfishness that is charaterized as the ultimate wrong – sin – that is putting yourself ahead of or in substitution for God. I did not learn the essence of Christian love, and the source of Christian morality, until I became a Christian and submitted my selfishness to love of God and neighbor. The touble is that no Christain is very good at carrying these commandments out. That is why we must rely on the saving grace of Christ to wipe away our failures.

I learned the legality of killing in law school. Yes it is legal to kill – in self defense – in war – the state in executions – for example.

Now, as to the source of secular and religious morality, I agree with C.S. Lewis that all humans have an innate sense of right and wrong – fairness and unfairness.

You can see this on any playground with children of early age.

I would also say that my American sense of morality was sourced, to some extent, in Western movies – good guys wear white hats and bad guys wear black hats – good guys kill bad guys only when necessary to prevent a wrong and bad guys kill to support greedy gains.

My question is: what kind of parents do they have, who failed to impress this basic knowledge on them, leaving it to church to do it? Wierd.
My answer to the question is, clearly, my parents.
BUT I suspect that my overall left-wing morality comes from two other sources in addition — i) primary school where we were taught that it was important to share, and that no-one deserved better treatment just because they were cleverer; and 1960’s and 70’s children’s TV in general, and Dr. Who in particular. There, I’ve said it, and it can’t be unsaid.

Illegal or wrong, either way, the military is going to have a problem with these church-educated people, whoever they are.

My first thought on reading that anecdote was…baloney. What we have in America is a culture that rewards the pretense of religion, and kids learn early that you will win approval for giving credit to your church, whether it actually did any good or not.

I can’t remember a specific moment or teaching that taught me killing is bad. It’s a consequence of progressive socialization with multiple inputs. Any time someone tries to tell you that X caused Y, where X is one simple thing and Y is a complex and variable thing constructed over years, it should be safe to say that they are oversimplifying.

PZ Meyers says:

What we have in America is a culture that rewards the pretense of religion, and kids learn early that you will win approval for giving credit to your church, whether it actually did any good or not.

This statement is utterly without support and is false. Depending on where you are located in America, this could be true – for example in small towns in the Bible belt. Yet Eszter teaches at Northwestern – a place where it is not likely to be popular to be a Christian or influenced by Christianity (I am extrapolating that “church” implies Christian influences). Other places in the United States are overtly hostile to Christians, such as Berkeley CA. Other than that I do not significantly disagree with the remainder of your comment.

Oli – I assume that you have not raised your own children.

One of my early and determinative memories was a Life photograph from the war in China: bodies stacked up by a railroad siding. Another was the heart-in-a-casket sequence in Disney’s Snow White (I was five). So I learned that killing people is problematical, and as Carlos suggested, Not Done in civilized circumstances.

Yes, television.

I’m a church-goer, but I’ve never had an experience where someone said murder is wrong. That’s just sort of fundamental – one of the things that everyone knows. Which means we learn it from television, where we learn much about social norms.

The thing that churches “teach” these days seems to be forgiving yourself, not being so hard on yourself, taking it easy, giving up anxiety, etc. Murder is much to heavy a topic.

Sebastian: I am referring to Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”. I do not recall Lewis discussing children on a playground. That allusion is mine. In my experience, watching children play – my boy and his friends – fairness and fairplay were present prior to, and developed through, play.

As I recall, Lewis appeals to the reader’s independent sense of fairness as a God given quality to humans to begin building his Christian apologetic. I agree with Lewis that fairness is innate, hardwired, to humans. This innate characteristic can be destroyed, warped or may be lacking in some of our kind, but I believe it to be almost universal. As is sin – ie the desire to separate self from, or substitute self for, God.

Lewis then argues inductively that the innate sense of fairness must originate from some extra-human source and that the source is God. Lewis then discusses his observations of almost universal human mores and that various religions get things closer to right as the source of moral authority, but only Christianity gets things absolutely right. Like you, it’s been a while since I read the book.

Adam: Christians differ about many topics. The cabal of differences in Christian theology is one of the off-putting aspects of Christianity to non-Christians. I do not believe in litmus test Christianity, however there are basics that most Christians agree on. If you disagree, then express the terms of your disagreement. In any event, all Christians and most non-Christians would agree that taking the life of another human without legal justification by a reckless or intentional act is wrong – that’s murder and it’s wrong. This is not an assumption, it’s absolutely wrong as a matter of civil law and human morality.

Breaker,

I don’t see how a Christian can claim that we have an innate sense of right or wrong, in light of original sin. If we insist on claiming that the innate capacity exists, then we have to say in the next breath that we’re virtually incapable of acting on it — which is effectively the same thing as claiming it wasn’t there in the first place.

Also, in re: C. S. Lewis — I think there’s a difference between an argument being well-written, learned, and witty and an argument being convincing. The enterprise of apologetics seems to be dead in the water from the get-go, simply because it’s never going to make sense to believe that someone rose from the dead. It’s also remarkable that the moral consequences that Christians have drawn from the Christ-event have been… virtually indistinguishable from the moral consequences of other religions.

Adam: Original sin was conveyed in connection with humankind eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. By doing this, humankind sought to take, or was duped into taking, on characteristics of God – discernment of good and evil. In other word, Genesis, states the very paradox as fact that you cannot reconcile. Humankind can act to do good and refrain from bad – just not all the time. No human – except one – has been perfect in the good/bad arena. To say that humans cannot be perfect is not to say that humans cannot be right some of the time or even most of the time. Yet, in God’s view, perfection is necessary to avoid the adverse consequences of God’s judgment – death.

Further, humankind attempts over and over to place God in the position of accountability for human justice. This is the paradox of Job and the paradox of the Psalms of lament, a paradox very critically discussed by the Teacher. God on the other hand just does not work things out on human terms and humans do not understand God’s ways.

Note that I do not suggest Lewis’ apologetics as convincing to non-Christians, only that I agree with some of his premises attributable to the source of moral perception in humans both Christian and non-Christian. I fully accept that only the Holy Spirit can ultimately effect a conversion to Christianity, yet Christ gives Christians the Great Commission to spread the Word of God, so we do play some part.

To accept Christ at Christ’s words, as Lewis does aptly point out, is to accept radical propositions beyond human comprehension or reason. I agree that no application of human logic can convince anyone of the resurrection. Either Christ is accepted as is, or he was a raving lunatic – as Lewis points out.

It is wholly unremarkable that the moral teachings of other religions or atheists seeking to live a moral life are similar if not the same. Again, original sin was contracted through obtaining this very capacity to discern good and evil. Conversion to Christianity does not make any human better or more moral than any non-Christian. Maturing Christians just have more of an awareness of how truly sinful they are, and continue to be. The paradox here is that Christians are expected to be “better” or more moral than non-Christians by non-Christians, but Christians are in reality observed to be no better. That’s because, Christianity alone does not make a human better, it only gives the Christian hope of a pardon from Christ if one truly believes. If one truly believes, then the person strives to be a better person in gratitude to Christ realizing the ultimate failure in the eyes of God without the redemption of Christ.

This is far a field of a secular forum, so Adam, I will not continue this discussion with you here but I will be happy to continue by email. You can go to my site to get my email address.

Um, I haven’t read all the comments, but the fact is that it isn’t illegal to kill people. And in more than a few instances–war, for example–killing people has been lauded.

It is illegal to murder people, or to commit manslaughter. But that is a very different issue.

I recently ran across a comment on “thou shalt not kill” and the “community” of people–the “in group–that “thou shalt not kill.” The definition of the “in group” determines the difference between murder/manslaughter and lauded killing. It would take a bit of research to locate that comment, though.

“The acceptance of what were random deaths, equal in every other aspect but the intent on the part of the killer, makes it obvious the dead were not the issue, so much as the agency of their dying.—msg

This is what I say about the Holocaust as compared to other genocides. I do think that also pure numbers, when large enough, make a qualitative difference; but my sense is that the Holocaust is distinct because of the combination of the magnitude coupled with intent and that intent (or motivation, or point of view) as expressed via method.

“these religions, and their “leaders” are the source of morality. Without them there’s only the pragmatic need for co-operative social order. The idea that there’s some “thing” called “morality” that functions like a universal physical principle comes directly from religion and nowhere else.—msg

Maybe and maybe not. There have been many attempts to build a materialist foundation for an absolutist morality. Whether they’ve succeeded or not is arguable. I’m just not convinced of the perils of moral relativism. I’m not convinced because, first of all, (almost) no one’s really a relativist. As a practical matter, we’re all absolutists. Secondly, I don’t really think that a strong relativist position means what absolutists think it means. That is to say, both the vulgar relativists and the absolutist critics of relativism have deeply misunderstood the physical theories that have played such a strong role in influencing our culture in this regard. Relativity denies an absolutist description of the universe as a whole and a single privileged point of view of an event; but it doesn’t at all do away with the idea that one can know something about the universe. It doesn’t do away with “truth”. More to the point, in a roundabout way, it greatly has furthered our understanding of the true nature of the universe. And since hardly anyone is experiencing the universe from a physical perspective that is divergent enough from someone else’s for these discrepancies to be apparent, as a practical matter we live in the Newtonian, non-relativistic universe. Even those NASA scientists with their Mars probes are using Newtonian, not Einsteinian, physics in plotting their trajectories. (They’re actually not truly using Newtonian physics, either, as a three-body problem is too difficult for us to completely solve. Sorry, I’m digressing.)

Similarly, I don’t think that hardly anyone experiences the moral universe under such divergent conditions that moral “relativity” is that apparent. I think whatever relativistic effects there are are swamped right now by simple ignorance. I’m pretty much arguing that a utilitarian basis for morality is as good as a metaphyiscal absolutism. Maybe not. But I have trouble with glib pronouncements that the only real basis for morality is metaphysics.

I also would like to point out that reading Plato is illuminating, since Socrates really, really doesn’t want to appeal to a metaphysics for a morality (although eventually he does), and he has quite a bit of success demonstrating the inevitability of morality without appealing to a metaphysical authority. There’s not a few Sophists in the dialogues that make essentially the argument you’re making (although often from the perspective of “might makes right” since they don’t believe there is an absolutist morality).

Other places in the United States are overtly hostile to Christians, such as Berkeley CA.

Having attended a liberal Christian church here in lovely Berkeley for three years now, and having found it to be one of the most wonderfully accepting places I’ve ever lived in regards to my faith, I would suggest that your above statement:
A) Is less than factual.
B) Is reflective of conveinient but shallow regional stereotypes.
C) Does not match my experiences, or those of the majority of my fellowship.
D) All of the above.

Mix & match for the answer you prefer.

Thanks,
—Biff

Children do not have an innate sense of right and wrong

But can’t you remember being a child and having a sense of right and wrong? Can’t you remember as a little child making someone cry (say) and feeling sorry, feeling that you had done something wrong? I’m distinguishing this from feeling frightened that someone might hear the crying and come and tell you off. I can remember feeling that too, of course.

In fact some of my earliest memories of moral issues are dislike of Bible stories (Noah’s ark, Abraham and Isaac etc.) because they violated my infant sense of morality.

FYI I added an update to the original post:
[UPDATE 1/27/04 10:30am CST: Since the comments have gotten long and some may miss this clarification: this is not the exact wording of what I had said in class. I said something along the lines of “not supposed to kill people”. My question was not about legalities it was more general.]

I appreciate the interesting comments. I realize there are contexts in which it is not illegal to kill people. The rights and wrongs of killing and various deaths isn’t really the focus of this class nor was it the point of my question to the class. The context was more about where/when/how we learn about some things that we are generally expected to know.

But you know, I think I started learning about killing (and other moral issues) even before I could comprehend church, from fairy tales or folk tales. I think they are being overlooked in this discussion, but they play a pretty big role in many children’s early lives.

The evil characters in these tales usually want to kill the protagonist (ala Snow White) or oppress them (Cinderella). Or else, you get a protagonist who breaks a rule and must pay for it, as in the “animal husband” stories like Beauty and the Beast, East of the Sun West of the Moon, etc. Which are also connected to Cupid and Psyche, of course….

…leading to Greek myths, which I also consumed at that time. Although the Olympian politics could get a bit hard for a kid to understand. I do remember being a bit confused by the idea of “hubris”.

I suppose this all counts as socialization inside the home, but it’s interesting that it’s such an ancient form of it.

Killing people is wrong? Damn. I must have been sick that day.

Well, it may be foolhardy to wander into a discussion already so involved, but I’ll offer this up: I think this all turns on what exactly you mean by wrong.

I think I probably appreciated that killing is wrong in the sense that I’d rather not have it done to me as soon as I could form the requisite thoughts. I think I had an innate sense of killing’s wrongness as a matter of equitable treatment equally innately, based on the kind of built-in fair-play rules discussed above.

But I think I learned through church, or through religious instruction (formally or at home), or through reading the Bible, that killing is wrong in the sense that it violates the moral order and offends God. (Of course, believing this presupposes believing in a God who can and will take offense at certain human acts and a moral order which undergirds created reality.)

Now, I don’t think I’ve exhuasted the potential meanings of wrong, but I think the ones I’ve listed are enough to demonstrate that those of us responding to this question are already working from several different perspectives.

Wrong is an innately moral concept, and in that sense I think we learn that a thing is wrong when we learn the moral system which defines what wrong is, even if a prior or parallel moral system contains what is, formally, the same proposition of wrongness.

I also have to say, coming from the perspective of a religious morality, that some of what’s been said above discounting religiously grounded moral systems is rather reductive and limited. I certainly can’t claim to understand fully the asserted coherence of an atheistic system of morality, but that doesn’t lead me to conclude that it’s arbitrary. I’d invite those posters who don’t personally believe in a religious (specifically a Christian) grounding of morality, to consider that there’s a lot more sophistication in the internals of the system than may have been apparent in your encounters with it.

Ophelia,

Good question. I’m going to answer from a Catholic perspective, since that’s the one I have, and I can’t pretend to understand some other system well enough to speak from it.

And from a Catholic perspective, the deity is necessary to make the moral system we have internally coherent. Some of what I’m calling the “sophisticated elements” wouldn’t survive without a deity and, moreover, the particular deity believed in by Catholics.

Two examples:
(1) Moral precepts derived from natural law require for their consistency that there be a creator, that the creator be intelligent (because the creator must have designed the creation), and that the creator be good (so that we can trust the moral precepts revealed in the design).

(2) Moral imperatives to virtue — basically anything that exceeds “Golden Rule” morality, and, for Catholics (and most if not all Christians), including the obligation to charity, the command to love one’s neighbor as one’s self, and exercise particular care for the poor and oppressed are sourced in a God who loves each and every human being unconditionally and calls us to aspire to that same love. And the moral attitude associated with the manner of practicing virtue is sourced explicitly in Christ.

As to the second part of the question:
Would the “sophisticated elements” remain valid and persuasive absent the deity?

As is evident from above, no — they wouldn’t. But that’s not a particularly damning indictment, as far as I’m concerned, because I’m not aware of any interesting arguments which are persuasive once one has falsified the axioms relied on by the reasoning.

And to bring all this back down to earth:
– You don’t need God/religion to judge that killing [murder] is wrong.
– You do need God/religion to believe that killing [murder] is wrong in certain meanings of the word wrong.
– But even if you do have God/religion in your moral system, that doesn’t mean that you’ve eliminated, or judged unpersuasive, all the secular reasons for reaching equivalent judgment, nor that having God in the system means that you’re reduced to a command morality with no deeper structure.

Morality is goal-directed.
Things are wrong or not because of their relation to some other thing, external to the action that’s being judged.
Nothing is just wrong. It’s wrong because.
Because it harms or threatens to harm. Because it’s counter to the good of society, individual liberty, the salvation of all our souls, the continued existence of mammalian life, etc.
The goal of religious morality is placed in the hands of a deity or, in a more selfish version, the personal benefit of the individual after death.
The goal of secular morality is a muddle of conflicting definitions, much like democracy and other human institutions. But every single moral system we know has that timeline.
The weakness of secular morality is that extending the timeline eventually leads to the infinite, limitless by definition, and thus to vague and hard-to-define places.
The strength of religious, or metaphysical, morality is that by extension it leads directly to the unprovable presence of God, a kind of limited infinite.
That current religious teaching is solely for the benefit of its institutions, that the goal of present religious morality is no more than the physical survival of religionists, doesn’t change the logical structure of their arguments.
A game we were taught in early religion classes was to keep asking why something is the way it is, starting from any point. It leads to God, they said.
Morality is the same. Why is it wrong to steal? Why should we be decent to each other? And what if I don’t care whether that makes it nicer for all of us?
There is no secular argument against the sociopath, just force and cunning and good luck, the enforcement of public morality. Whereas the religious argument against the sociopath is that he’s evil, and therefore outside the bounds of decency and reciprocity, and therefore subject to force and cunning, and the bestowal on the enforcers of good luck, or grace, by a partisan deity. Cops know this better than priests.
The scale is great enough there’s an overlap between the secular and the metaphysical, up to a point. We’re at that point. Religious morality and secular morality are at a fork in the road, where at one time they ran parallel.
The conflicting impulses, toward one goal or the other, won’t be reconciled by discussion or by persuasion. Like all biological conflicts, they’ll be decided by a competition in which anything goes.
In other words, by a completely a-moral, or more accurately non-moral, contest, in which the tautology of the ‘best man’ having won will again play out. Because the winner gets to say who’s best.

Sam-
At the risk of intruding on what seems to have become a private comversation, “innate” has a very specific meaning.
It does not mean, as you seem to think by your use of it, “irrefutable” or foundational.
It means there from birth. From nativity. Born with it. Unlearned.
Proving the existence of moral revulsion as “innate”, rather than learned pre-verbally, might be just a little harder than simply saying it.
–
To a woman whose child has just been eaten by one, the tiger is evil; to the tiger mother feeding her cubs, the human child was no more than food.
Our human view of nature “red in tooth and claw” is partisan. We have, as a species, under the banner of “dominion”, driven every other major predator on earth to its knees, or to extinction.
Your “Creator” was created to justify that partisan view. That creation has necessitated a steadily more schizoid relationship with the natural world, leading to a desperate antagonism that now bids well to become fatal, to horrifying numbers of other species as well as to our own.
Those of us who do not subscribe to a tale of divine afterlife mourn that dying.
Anyone who speaks for God must answer for that as well as for the presence of cancer and fleas.
This would be my main, not innate, but deeply felt, point.

MSG,

I’m with Ophelia — it’s not meant to be a private conversation at all.

A couple of responses:
-I’m not claiming to speak for God; I’m just trying to offer an explanation for why I believe in God with reference to a reflection on moral systems and our learning of them.

I’m also with you on the meaning of “innate”, and was using it deliberately. I meant it in the sense of “unlearned”. I’m well aware that that’s a hard assertion to prove; the counter-position that such revulsion is learned is equally hard to prove. (cf all the posts above about the sense of fairness — an innate moral sense as evidence of conscience which was designed by a Creator is among the classic arguments for the Christian world view, with one of the most famous versions being C.S. Lewis’ in Mere Christianity.) I have concluded, based on my experience and reflection, that a moral sense rooted in a divinely-designed conscience (thus innate) is, on balance, the more complete and compelling explanation. (Of course, the presence of an innate conscience does not preclude the learned development and evolution of it.) Others obviously disagree.

If you’d like to take your examples in greater detail, I’d be happy to continue to talk about it, either here or in email (delete the -dot- in my address which is there for spam-armoring).

Ophelia, I agree with you on intellectual grounds about the nature of the questions. Reason alone can never justify religious faith. I’d offer that the questions that don’t have (reasoned) answers sometimes elicit a response from us that is deeper than reason.

You assume so much, msg.