Moral Compasses

Every single person on this planet, no matter the religion or lack of one, no matter the devoutness or lack thereof, applies a moral compass to his or her beliefs and actions. Even scriptural literalists, in believing or concluding or asserting that literal interpretation is the proper path, are in fact exercising a personal moral barometer.

“I am a Christian because I believe Christ’s teachings are moral.”

“I am a Muslim because I believe the Koran is the inerrant and final word of Allah.”

What comes next is the telltale. In these and most other religions, we find troubling teachings and imperatives. The vast majority downplay those or engage in apologetics that contort their plain meaning into something more palatable (and moral). It is the rare bird, today, that will assert that the instructions in the Old Testament regarding the ownership of slaves - or the rules regarding how hard they can be beaten - as moral. Instead, we get a variety of rationalizations, ranging from redefining slavery to “it was just how the world worked back then.” Similarly, Muhammed married a six year old and consummated that marriage when she was nine, but he gets a free pass because... times were different? Those were social norms back then?

Notice something there?

Things considered immoral today are not denounced by religious adherents because they are “from the past.”

Fine.

I and many others argue that morality evolves, that societies adjust their compasses over time.

However, religions do not*. The moralities they preach come from scriptures that cannot be revised or updated.

You cannot assert the timelessness or “objective/absolute” nature of scripture-based morality while also arguing that some of it is just the product of the time it was written and thus out-dated today.

You cannot wave away the immorality of slavery while claiming that morality must be based on the Bible, and you cannot wave away the immorality of marrying and having sex with a child while claiming that morality must be based on the Koran.

Instead, own the truth: your own moral compass, rooted in human genetic wiring and shaped by societal evolutions, overrides scripture. Realize that you pick and choose the parts that support how you think things should be, then point at those as if they rather than you, are the source and foundation. Accept that you are more moral than your holy books.

This doesn’t mean you cannot still believe in whichever god you’ve chosen (or, more commonly, had drilled into your brain as a child). Believe what you want, reconcile it however you want. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are almost as many variants of Christianity as there are Christians. Every one I’ve had relevant conversations with engages in some degree of “cafeteria” behavior, emphasizing the parts they like, downplaying or ignoring the parts they don’t, and altering dogma to make it more palatable.

I really don’t care how you arrive at your moral code, as long as it’s a good one, and as long as you don’t seek to invoke some appeal-to-scripture to insist that yours is more valid than another’s. Instead, if you find that you and I disagree on a particular point, make the case for your view on merit and on the evolution from which it evolved.

Finally, before you argue that, absent guidance from on high, there can be no foundation for morality, take a good, hard look at what that guidance has put forth. All of it. If you ignore the parts you don’t like, you merely prove my point.

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*They actually do. Religions emphasize, de-emphasize, offer updated apologetics, and engage in other modifications of scriptural interpretation. They don’t like to put it in “evolutionary” terms, however, because that would undermine their argument about absolute morality as handed down from above.