Great article in my local paper this morning: Does Religion Make Us Better People? (You know I can't pass up an opportunity to get all fired up about this sort of thing.)
My take? No, religion does not generally make people better behaved. In a lot of cases, it makes people behave pretty badly, in fact. There seems to be a whole lot of self-righteousness, intolerance, prejudice, and hypocrisy going on in circles of faith. There seems to be an underlying attitude of not being compassionate, of not being altruistic, of acting in one's own self-interests first and foremost and not that of fellow human beings', of not taking steps to make the world a better place for everyone. Of course, that is a generalization and doesn't apply to everyone. I'm sure there are fine, compassionate, upstanding Christians, just like there are fine, compassionate, upstanding Agnostics and Atheists.
What really chaps my hide is this notion that without God, without religion, without the Ten Commandments, for crying out loud, there would be no morality. And I've been personally confronted with this notion a number of times. I've been asked, incredulously, to my face, "If you don't have God, where are your morals?" It's ridiculous and utterly insulting to proclaim that without God, a person is without a moral compass. It's also ridiculous to assume that a person who has God and/or religion at the center of their life is of higher moral character than someone who doesn't.
I find it interesting and pleasantly surprising that, so far at least, the majority of the commenters to that article seem to be non-believers (right here in the conservative Republican, Mega-church heartland). Maybe our numbers aren't as small as I thought.
So what do you think? Do you think religion and/or God makes people better people?
