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Tag: "morality"

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Inoculation for Atheism
By Dan Klarmann on March 14th, 2009

Inoculation for Atheism

In the shadow of all the antivax buzz lately, I’d like to recommend a process of intellectual inoculation for children. This post is based on Best Practices 5: Encourage religious literacy from The Meming of Life. It illustrates the benefit of teaching your children about religion, to protect them from its excesses.

McGowan argues that parents who want their kids to follow in their secular (agnostic/atheist/ignostic/etc) footsteps should not obsessively protect them from all exposure to the churchy crowd. Rather one needs to gradually expose them to doses of gentle strains of all the relevant faith memes. If not, they will be vulnerable to the first virulent strain to come along when they begin independent thought, and have a “teen epiphany”. (Excerpt)

Struggles with identity, confidence, and countless other issues are a given part of the teen years. Sometimes these struggles generate a genuine personal crisis, at which point religious peers often pose a single question: “Don’t you know about Jesus?” If your child says, “No,” the peer will come back incredulously with, “YOU don’t know JESUS? Omigosh, Jesus is The Answer!” Boom, we have an emotional hijacking. And such hijackings don’t end up in moderate Methodism. This is the moment when nonreligious teens fly all the way across the spectrum to evangelical fundamentalism.

A little knowledge about religion allows the teen to say, “Yeah, I know about Jesus”-and to know that reliable answers to personal problems are better found elsewhere.

It is best to start early. Bedtime stories should have consistency for the comfort of the child, and variety to hold the interest of the child. Maybe do a month of “how we got here” stories from various cultures. Kipling, Torah, Norse, Navajo, Hindu, and so on. Show the richness of cultures and the similarities of ideas that underlie all the world religions.

But parents need to be prepared. Learn about oral traditions and the power of mythos. Read Joseph Campbell , Homer , and The Arabian Nights . Know of Gilgamesh and Beowulf and Odin , the Ring of the Nibelungen and the Bhagavad Gita , and certainly know the current local favorite, the Torah .

American Culture • Communication • Culture • Education • Featured • Religion • ignorance
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An appeal to practical moral wisdom
By Erich Vieth on February 17th, 2009

An appeal to practical moral wisdom

Barry Schwartz recently delivered a sensational 20-minute talk on the importance of practical wisdom. He began his talk by describing the obvious: we now live in a highly dysfunctional rule-bound society. What should we do about it? We need to make sure that kindness, care and empathy are a part of every job, whether or not these responsibilities are contained in the official job description. All of us need to have both moral will and moral skill, the two essential components of Aristotle’s conception of “moral wisdom.” Luckily for us, we now have a President who is willing to take the risk of reminding Americans of their duties to pursue moral wisdom.

Schwartz deserved that standing ovation he received after delivering this talk at TED. Much of his talk concerned our obsessions with rules. Yes, rules are oftentimes hopeful. They often help us avoid the mistakes of the past. On the other hand, wise people know that they sometimes need to improvise. They know when to break the rules in order to remedy situations. They know that they are never excused from being kind and decent, regardless of the “rules.” Schwartz gives several salient examples, an especially good one involving a janitor. Wise people know that they need to use rules not simply to “follow the rules” but to serve the needs of other people.

Communication • Culture • Education • Featured • Good and Evil • Meaning of Life • Politics • Psychology Cognition
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By Erich Vieth on January 25th, 2009

Humanists note that Obama’s secular upbringing led to steadfast moral character

Via Pharyngula. The American Humanist Association is pointing to Barack Obama to make the point that a secular upbringing can lead to upstanding moral character.

Good and Evil • Religion
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By Erich Vieth on November 25th, 2008

Paul Kurtz: Belief in God is not essential for moral virtue.

Paul Kurtz is the chairman and founder of the Center for Inquiry and the Editor-in-Chief of FREE INQUIRY Magazine.   He is also a prolific author.   Kurtz is featured in a Washington Post article entitled, “Belief in God Essential for Moral Virtue?“  This is a succinct article that is well worth reading.  Kurtz goes to [...]

Good and Evil • Religion
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By Erich Vieth on November 25th, 2008

Jonathan Haidt urges that we escape moral righteousness

In this lecture on TED, Jonathan Haidt discusses his approach, which involves “five foundations of morality.” Haidt also explains that, in our attempts to better understand morality, too many of us are trapped in a non-ending cycle in which “everybody thinks they are right.” We are in need of humility, and the best way to get moral humility is to escape moral righteousness by striving to step out of the struggle. We need to see that liberals and conservatives both have something to offer to the conversation of change versus stability.

I’ve written repeatedly and glowingly about Haidt’s approach to morality. You can find earlier DI posts regarding Haidt’s approach to morality here and here.

Good and Evil • Politics • Psychology Cognition • Religion
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The incessant allure of Republican morality and what Democrats can do about it.
By Erich Vieth on September 10th, 2008

The incessant allure of Republican morality and what Democrats can do about it.

For the past few years, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has successfully injected a huge does of psychology into the study of morality. Along the way, he has gone a long way toward bridging the “is” with the “ought,” a chasm that many philosophers have insisted to be unbridgeable.  Haidt explores these moral-psychological issues in highly [...]

American Culture • Consumerism • Good and Evil • Meaning of Life • Politics • Psychology Cognition • Science • ignorance • law and order
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By Erich Vieth on July 17th, 2008

Ordinary disgust taints moral judgments

I’ve written before about the work of Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”). He is a psychologist who has taken an experimental approach to investigating morality. I was highly impressed by Haidt’s analysis of conservative versus liberal versus of morality, for instance. In his previous work, Haidt determined that disgust played a significant role [...]

Good and Evil • Psychology Cognition
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By Erich Vieth on May 29th, 2008

If you are exposed to arguments that there is no free will, you’ll be more likely to cheat

Ouch! The serious study of philosophy or neuroscience might make you less moral. That’s my take-away from a recent article: “The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating,” by Kathleen D. Vohs and Jonathan W. Schooler. This particular article by Vohs and Schooler [...]

Psychology Cognition • Science
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By Erich Vieth on March 12th, 2008

How (corn) ethanol kills: a lesson in basic economics pertaining to fuel supply, fuel demand and price.

In an earlier post, I argued that people need to better appreciate that dollars are fungible (see here  and here).  Why is it important to understand that dollars are fungible?  A case in point is the new American enthusiasm for turning food into fuel. Consider this report from Fortune Magazine:
The growing myth that corn is [...]

Consumerism • Economy • Energy • Environment • Food • Good and Evil
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By Erich Vieth on January 14th, 2008

Steven Pinker tells us what’s new in the study of morality

In Steven Pinker’s article, published in the NYT Magazine, you’ll learn of many of the new developments in the scientific study of morality, many of these new findings unearthed by neuroscientists.  The study of morality has come a long way in the past ten years.  It’s no longer an exercise in near-futility led by academic philosophers [...]

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By Erich Vieth on October 10th, 2007

Why the Ten Commandments are a cop-out

Cop-out:  a feebly transparent excuse or explanation for refusing to face up to something. 
We constantly hear that the Ten Commandments are the highest achievement of moral law.  We even hear this claim from public officials who can’t even name the Commandments.  They want to hang the Commandments everywhere, as though their display will cause bad people [...]

Good and Evil • Religion
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By Erich Vieth on July 07th, 2007

Why conservatives and liberals talk past each other on moral issues.

I’ve studied moral philosophy for many years, mostly in frustration.  Though many philosophical theories of morality have offered tantalizing glimmers, they ultimately fail to account for the “moral” decisions people make in the real world.  Traditional philosophical accounts of morality have appeared especially feeble in light of the ongoing and volatile American culture wars.  For [...]

Good and Evil • Meaning of Life • Politics • Psychology Cognition • Religion
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By Erich Vieth on July 04th, 2007

Disgust as a basis for morality

It is striking that so many conservatives spend so much energy condemning gays. They don’t just criticize gays; they condemn gays with intense passion. Nor does this process of moral judgment usually involve any sort of delicate weighing process. Too often it is a visceral and unrelenting moral harpooning delivered by the likes of Ted Haggard—or, at least, the sort of judgment previously delivered by the then-closeted version of Ted Haggard, whose name is now synonymous with “reaction formation.”

Many of the people who condemn gays on street corners and pulpits remind me of steam boilers on the verge of blowing up. Anti-gay bigots are rarely if ever attempting to work through the details of any of the three main historical philosophical approaches to morality (consequentialism, deontology or virtue) when they condemn gays. No, there is nothing much philosophical about the way most people rail against the gays. They are not driven by any sort of philosophy. In my experience, they are primarily driven by disgust.

What especially disturbs conservative Christians are images of men kissing men and men having sex with other men. Such images are so incredibly disgusting to those who hate gays that it has become a favorite insult on the streets and in the military to shout “You’re GAY!” And when this insult is hurled in the process of casting moral judgment, it is done by people whose faces are contorted with utter disgust.

Because such condemnations of gays are so visceral, this raises the issue of whether disgust is a valid basis for morality . . .

Bigotry • Civil Rights • Culture • Good and Evil • Meaning of Life • Politics • Psychology Cognition • Religion • Science • The Middle East
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