Jezebel railed yesterday Epitaphs and other about those believers who think that human beings have morals and thank God for being good, we need you. That said,
paranormal there a reason that escapes me that makes the vast majority of the faithful of any religion have the absolute conviction that without God there is no moral. And I do not understand. Being a believer does not guarantee that you are good people, and vice versa. There is no morality without gods. There are good people who do not believe that it should be because if you do not burn forever in an oven extradimensional. And the value of his goodness, kindness, autonomous, authentic, is as great or more than those who are good for fear of punishment.
Being atheist does not mean being evil. And we have to accept that. God makes you no good. If you are a bastard, I'll believe in who you believe.
Einstein said: "If people are good only because they fear punishment, and expect a reward, we are indeed a sorry group." I, like Jezebel, I think we can be good without God, and I agree with Einstein that, if not, would be a sort unfortunate. Also, fortunately, there are studies showing that morality exists beyond of God. Richard Dawkins, in 'The God Delusion', talks about some of them. Quoted Marc Hauser, a biologist at Harvard, who in his book "Moral Minds: How nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong ', made a series of experiments showed that, under specific scenarios, believers and non-believers took the same decision, regardless of their beliefs.
. Sets an example. Imagine these three scenarios.
. uncontrolled 1 .- A train approaching from the road and threatens to kill five people, which we can not warn of danger to come apart. Denise, the protagonist, is located next to the needles of the change of the railway and could divert the train to another track. In the other way, however, another person, so she would die if that Denise decided to save the other five. What would you do?
, 2 .- The same starting position, but now it is impossible to divert the train, which goes directly to kill five people. There is only one possibility to stop, dropping a large weight from a bridge above it. The only weight is important that we find a very fat man is going over the bridge, which achieved mass to stop the train before it ran over those five people. Yield " the fat man at the railway, which would sacrifice one life to save five?
. 3 .- Change of scenery. In one hospital we found five patients who urgently need five different transplants. All of them will die if not soon find the five bodies, but there is not a single donor. In the waiting room, however, a patient is completely healthy and their organs could save the lives of five people sick. "I'd kill to extract their organs and save five people?
. In the first case, almost certainly would have all decided to move the hands and save the five people, because would be a lesser evil. We feel morally acceptable. In the second case, sure there have been more questions and finally, most have thought that it is not morally acceptable to throw the fat man onto the tracks. In the third case, although it is exactly like the second one will be doubted: no sane man would have killed the waiting room. Dawkins argues that intuition leads us to make these decisions because both the fat man on the bridge as the healthy patient waiting room are innocent bystanders, and do not consider morally acceptable that swept suddenly a bad situation without your consent. Immanuel Kant speaks of the principle that a rational being should never be used como un medio no consentido para alcanzar un fin, aunque sea en beneficio de otros. Esa es la clave: utilizar a otro. En el primer caso, sin embargo, la persona que muere no está siendo utilizada, sino que la está siendo utilizada es la vía alternativa del tren. La persona, simplemente, tiene la mala suerte de estar en ese lugar. En los otros dos casos, es totalmente diferente y sí estaríamos utilizamos a una tercera persona como herramienta.
. Pues bien, en los experimentos, las respuestas de los sujetos ante estos tres hipotéticos casos eran las mismas independientemente de si las personas eran creyentes o no, lo que da una muestra de que compartimos unos principios morales, más allá de que Believe it or not the existence of God. There's more.
. Hauser and philosopher Peter Singer, on the job 'Morality without religion', published in 2006 by '
Free Inquiry', focused on three hypothetical problems and compared the results thrown by the answers of atheists and believers . Subjects were asked to choose whether an action was morally 'binding', 'permissible' or 'forbidden'. The three dilemmas were:
. 1 .- Denise's dilemma. 90% of people said it was permissible to divert the train, killing one to save five.
. 2 .- There a child drowning in a pond and only you can help. The downside is that your pants would destroy in the process. 97% (yes, there were people who did not see it clearly ...) of people agreed that the child had to be saved over the integrity of the pants.
. 3 .- The dilemma of organ transplantation. 97% of subjects agreed that it was morally forbidden to exploit and kill a healthy person for the five organs.
. The conclusion was that there was no difference between the moral judgments of atheists and religious believers. Dawkins concludes: "This seems compatible with the vision that I and many others maintain, that do not need God to be good-or bad. " Hauser, author of the studies also concluded: "Managing our moral judgments is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of mind that evolved over millions of years to build a range of possible moral systems."
