Secularism and Ethics

An article in Der Speigel discusses research into differences in how secular and religious people think, and how this impacts views on ethics.

(Thanks to Lara for the link!)

One of the things we're learning by reading the Bible is that it is deeply morally conflicted.  A person who takes these stories literally must have an enormous struggle to reconcile what they know to be moral, compared to the horrible atrocities and cruelty carried out in God's name.  A person unencumbered by such nonsense would have no such moral difficulty.  I'm not saying that all atheist are moral and all religionists are immoral; I'm just saying that that the clearly immoral teachings in the Bible (and, to be fair, other religious texts) stack the deck against religionists.

That's my view.  Whether or not the conclusion is supported by research, the observation seems to be:

Sociologist Phil Zuckerman, who hopes to start a secular studies major at California's Pitzer College, says that secularists tend to be more ethical than religious people. On average, they are more commonly opposed to the death penalty, war and discrimination. And they also have fewer objections to foreigners, homosexuals, oral sex and hashish.

Yup.  As political issues, these aren't simply black-and-white cases with simple solutions.  But there's a clear division between ethical positions (in favor of killing and discrimination vs. against; in favor of limiting the rights of a minority vs against; in favor of proscribing certain sexual acts vs. against; and so on).  And guess who is consistently on the wrong side of this ethical fence?  Evangelical Christians.  And the irony is that they tend to push their anti-ethical views through the vehicle of the republican party in the name of "family values." 

What encourages me about this article is the increasing trend of researchers looking into the differences between secular minds and religious minds.  My background is cognitive psychology.  I remember as an undergraduate studying attitudes and public opinion, and doing studies on attitudes towards atheism (hint: it wasn't positive).  The surprising thing is that, even though secularists tend to hold more ethical positions, they are almost universally reviled.  Prejudice against atheists in this country is terrible, and holding steady.  But at least we may be starting to understand this, and understanding is the precursor to fixing it.

[From Der Speigel: Does Secularism Make People More Ethical? posted 8/11/2011]