Morality,Ethics and God part-2

I derive great pleasure in throwing spanners in my friends’ faiths. I myself am a confirmed atheist (an agnostic at best-I can’t seem to decide between the two, but I definitely do not have much truck with god.) and always it is my fervent desire to see if any of my friends can give me reason enough to pause and reconsider my beliefs. I enjoy discussions with Shankar on this topic coz he truly tries to find logical arguments rather than continue saying-“Try to feel it” as many of the other fools do.

So here I will try to give another of the arguments that occurred to me for refuting the existence of god and putting morality in his place.

I regard moral principles to be absolutes. They are not constructs of somebody’s fancy but rather the requirements of man’s existence as man and not some primitive beast. They should be followed not because we belong to some religion, or follow a certain spiritual leader, but because following them allows us to avail the full scope of our faculties in the most productive manner. In part-1 of this, I have shown how this applies to honesty. Similar arguments can be found for other moral precepts.

Now we come to the crux of the matter. If we believe that moral principles are, in fact, an end in themselves, that they must be adhered to for purely pragmatic and not mystical reasons, then does that not eliminate the role of God from our whole moral edifice? If we must be honest for honesty’s own sake rather than to escape the retribution of the almighty, then what exactly do we need the almighty for? And looking at the whole issue in this light, does it not seem more likely that god is just a concept dreamt up to keep men from deviating from what is moral and just, like demons devised by parents to get children to eat their food or to go to bed.

As far as I understand, god has the following 3 roles:-
1. Origin of life.
2. Maintenance of life.
3. Book-keeping of sins and appropriation of punishment for the same.

Most of us, I hope, agree that origin of life is a matter of science and not religion. The reasons for origin of life on earth may be obscure, but they are definitely not supernatural.

The last two I now club into one and hold morality responsible for both. If moral laws are broken, it is a sin and the retribution is immediate in terms of reduction in chances of survival. Inner peace and conscientiousness all stem from this basic belief in some essential moral laws and not a god.

Hence, we see that we can easily remove god from the whole picture and put science and morality in his place. Doing so also removes some other ‘irrational’ beliefs like rebirth, heaven and hell. If we violate our moral code, then what the world becomes is hell. There is no punishment in an after-life. The retribution is then and there in that same life and that is the extent of Karma (which incidentally is more consistent with the original meaning of the word-‘karm’ from Sanskrit meaning action).

One thing that becomes essential in such a scenario is to correctly distinguish between moral principles and religious dictats. e.g Honesty is a moral principle, while not eating beef is merely a religious injunction ( I can see no reason why one animal should be more holy than the others). Thus while we decide on the moral code that we must follow, it is essential that we carefully sift the dogmatic from the rational and discard the former.