Morality Evolved Without Any God, Religion And Scripture
By
Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
6 April
2024
"Those,
blinded by god and religion, will never concede that morality evolved without
any god, religion and scripture."
Bertrand
Russell's aforementioned statement from his book 'The Value of Philosophy'
discards religion and god's role in shaping humankind's morality. Mind you,
Russell was not an outright atheist. He was an agnostic. Yet, he totally
pooh-poohed the belief, held by religionists and believers, that religion and
god helped humankind evolve morality.
Here, I
don't want to dwell upon the morality of an atheist as I've discussed this
subject ad nauseam in New Age Islam and several other publications and
portals.
The advent
of collective morality took thousands of years to evolve. Morality is not a
capsule or a commandment sent by an imaginary god, propounded by man-made
religions and spread by antediluvian scriptures. In other words, it never had a
definite esoteric template (for further moral development).
Morality is
conscientious behaviour, rather spirit, that developed with human consciousness
and conscience. It evolved with humans' collective sense of propriety and
cognitive skills. And don't ask foolishly as to who gave conscience and
consciousness to humans? No; no god gave this to humans. We developed this
during our long and arduous process of evolution. Humans are constantly
evolving and we have always been in the process of evolution. That we still
need the help of god and religion to understand our morality is proof that
we're not yet fully evolved.
If you
believe that morality came from religion and god, will you emulate certain
actions of your revered characters? Will anyone, let alone Muslims, marry his
son's wife just because Muhammad married the (former) wife of his son Zayd?
Will you still have a retinue of slaves just because all three Semitic faiths
and their gods justified slavery? Will you kill a Dalit for reciting Vedas just
because Ram beheaded Shambuk for reciting verses from the Vedas? Shambuk was a
Dalit. Will you approve of killing Bali and Meghnad / Indrajit (Ravan's son) on
the sly? Would all women follow Draupadi's example of living with five husbands
despite opting for Arjun? Will you approve of the 'enlightened' Buddha's action
when he refused to initiate his step-mother Mahaprajapati Gotmi when she wanted
to join Buddha's Sangh (order) because the 'enlightened' Buddha was against
women's entry into the religious order? It was Ananda, Buddha's favourite
disciple, who convinced Buddha to accept his old step-mother as a monk. Buddha
apologised and had the magnanimity to admit that he was far from being
enlightened. When Jain Agamas repeatedly state that women are incapable of
salvation and create a kind of equivocal scriptural morality, will any sane
individual accept that? Should women accept it as their 'flawed' spiritual
fate?
All these
instances have been culled from mankind's utterly bogus faiths and from the
'teachings' of equally useless so-called 'prophets'. Can such instances from
religious books form a platform on which humanity's model of morality will ever
be able to stand firmly? Never.
Morality is
zeitgeist. It's the spirit of times. Morality also evolves with the passage of
times and is never static.
Nietzsche
said the same thing. He didn't offer or postulate any new or alternative
morality. Nor did Ayn Rand claim to give a new set of morality to the world as
if it were a pair of clothes. They urged us to rejig our sense of morality. Nietzsche's
Ubermensch (Superman in German) didn't give birth to caste system, apartheid,
slavery etc.
Caste
system in Hinduism is more than 2 thousand-yr-old. Poor Nietzsche was born in
1844 and died in 1900. Apartheid and discrimination between the blacks and
whites have always existed. It still exists. Nietzsche said, "New humans,
with a new morality and new sense of awareness, will be above all man-made
discrimination." Please read his two books, 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'
and 'The Dawn of the Day.' He exhorts humans to question the turbid and
ambiguous morality that came from religions. "What your conscience
approves without qualms and scruples is your morality, " he stated in his book 'On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral
Sense.'
Morality as
a religious debris must be thrown away. He talked of rationality and
non-religio-spiritual goodness of mankind. Yuval Noah Harari also says the same
thing. Ayn Rand may be a populist philosopher, she developed a philosophical
system, known as Objectivism. Remember,
morality is distilled and filtered spirit extracted from the accumulated
human wisdom over an inordinately long span of time.
Lastly,
"We also know that modern man was at constant war with the other species
of humans until they completely genocided every other species about ten
thousand years ago." Who were the other species of humans the writer is
talking about? Let me quote Salman Rushdie, "Religion and god indeed
befuddle the most intelligent of humans. But are they really intelligent is the
question that remains to be answered. " I've nothing further to say.
----
A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul
is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He
has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several
languages including Persian.
URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/morality-god-religion-scripture/d/132092