Religion does not, cannot, and never has provided a basis for morality. Many would contend that religion’s ability to provide morals to a society is one of its great virtues. They are wrong. If you adhere to a religious moral code, and I do mean strictly adhere, then you are a truly immoral person. On what basis do you accept this moral code? Either you accept it because it is what you were taught, you came to it through what you believe is divine revelation, or you came to it because you found it agreeable. These are all terrible reasons for selecting a moral code.
The last possibility is the best of the three. If you came to adhere to the religious moral code because you found it agreeable, then you used your own moral judgement and critical thinking in assessing the moral code. But since you adhere strictly to this code, you really are a hypocrite. Why would you adhere strictly to a moral code if you came to that code based on your own judgement? There’s no reason to abandon your judgement once you've agreed to a moral code. Your strict adherence requires you to suspend your judgement and critical thinking, something no moral individual would do.
Now suppose you claim that you came to this code through divine revelation. Your revelation is not independently verifiable. Indeed, you yourself cannot verify its divinity. If your god commands you to commit genocide, do you simply do it because your god told you to? You owe it to your fellow man and to yourself to never suspend your judgement in such critical matters. Even supposing that your god is right, and that genocide is truly the moral thing to do, how could we possibly know that before hand? Supposing you commit the genocide and hindsight reveals that your god was right, you are still a person guilty of genocide. It doesn't matter that you were right, because you had no justification for your actions, and because of that you might as well have been wrong.
The third possibility is that you believe this moral code because it is what you were taught. This is probably where most people fall. It may be the case that you were taught a certain set of morals, you questioned these morals and tested them against experience and found them to be sound. In this case, your morals are justified, because you have applied your own judgement to them. But if another man learned the same set of morals, never questioned them, and simply accepted them, then he is immoral. A moral code is intended to compliment one’s judgement In all cases where one takes morals from religion, one takes those morals blindly, and suspends judgement. History has demonstrated the danger of this.
Proponents of religious morality would like to point to the teachings of Jesus as examples of good moral teachings that our society accepts. I don’t see the argument, but I’ll explain it, as I believe it is intended. Jesus gave good moral principles, and the basis for those teachings is that Jesus was the Son of God. I feel like I am inadequately setting up the argument, because it is so glaringly open to attack, but I don’t think it has much more defence Society only accepts those moral teachings as they agree with the judgement of that society. We’re not testing Jesus’ teachings against his claims of divinity; we’re testing them against our own reasoning. We never need take into account his claims of divinity and can reject or accept as many of his teachings as we see fit. So we can say that Jesus’ teachings are only sound and moral insofar as they stand up to our own judgement and reasoning. This is the case for any moral teachings. I fail to see how this is an argument for religious morality.
In a society that has religious freedom such as our own in the west, religious morality is preposterous. If each person is entitled to his own religion, and each person gets his morality from his religion, then you have no basis for saying that another person is wrong in his actions.
Individuals who do not like exercising their grey matter prefer to think in terms of authoritative right and wrong. And that authority undoubtedly comes from their religion, not from someone else’s. However, religion does not even provide a basis for an absolute right and wrong. This is because we must apply our own judgement in issues of morality. There is no ultimate authority upon which we can base our morals and say ‘this is right and this is wrong.’ Not even god could do that for us, because we have a moral responsibility to question him. To not be a heretic, is immoral.
