Someone pointed out this article, which mentions that
A Christian pro-family advocate is linking youth violence to a godless, Darwinist worldview. Focus on the Family vice president Bill Maier says atheistic beliefs have led to an alarming increase in youth violence. Young people are more aggressive than ever, he asserts, with many participating in fight clubs and posting violent videos on the Internet. But that is what you get from Darwinist evolution, the Focus on the Family official contends. "If we have a prevailing worldview that teaches that, basically, human beings evolved from the slime and we have no intrinsic worth or value or meaning," he explains, "then naturally we are going to see individuals begin to gravitate toward behavior such as this."
In response specifically to the italicized section (my italics), someone made a great comment:
I agree with this statement completely, and this illustrates my point about science and religion being incompatible ways of being human.
If you teach kids that there is no value in being human unless you are a faithful servant of an ancient Near-Eastern war god, then when those kids learn that the god is a myth, they're going to lose the basis for their belief in the value of the human being.
If you teach kids that moral codes only have value if they are backed by the authority of the Great Cosmic Fairy-King, then when the kids realize there is no Fairy-King, they will question the value of morality.
But if you drop all that nonsense and teach kids to just pay attention to others and develop a healthy sense of empathy and a deep personal appreciation for the intrinsic value of justice and fairness in a world of interdependent people, then the Fairy-King becomes irrelevant and their sense of dignity, morality and fairness are not built on unreliable mythic vapors.
The problem is that religion keeps telling kids that the Fairy-King is essential to their worth and their goodness, and that they are essentially shitty creatures without the saving grace of the Fairy-King, and science keeps telling them the Fairy-King doesn't exist. Put those two things together and you've got a problem raising kids to be healthy, responsible, moral adults.
It's obvious that many religious people cannot conceive of morality outside of religion. And since their religious beliefs are nonsense, and they are inevitably going to be confronted with that miserable reality on a daily basis, the moral foundations of our society are weak and unreliable.
He's so right it hurts.
2 comments:
Wow...amazing. I had never thought of A(teaching/having faith)+B(destruction/lack of faith)=C(kids who are lost and confused), only that they exist as A or B and the situation, C, and similar to the way the author of the article sees it as B->C. Kudos udargo.
While I haven't clearly defined myself, I am disappointed with people, namely the ignorant religious (ignorant in that there is a lack of effort to understand), outright saying and quietly believing that Atheists or Agnostics are unable to act ethically. Or rather choose not to because they fail to believe in an afterlife, eternal punishment or glory. But WOW...well said udargo.
I was thinking almost those same thoughts recently in relation to the psychological concept of "motivational crowding-out" (related to the concept "cognitive dissonance.")
The canon of psychological research includes several studies demonstrating this concept. One example of this is that children who are rewarded (eg with candy) for a certain behavior (eg reading) will think that they are reading only so they can get candy. When the candy stops, so does the reading. Children who are not offered such a reward will think they are reading because they like it.
Similarly, if we tell people that they should be "good" because of a fairy-king, it seems pretty clear what will happen once they realize there is no fairy-king.
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