Religion is just a way of life, not the way we should judge people.



Murder, robbery, child molest, psychopaths; most of us always associate these acts as crime, something bad that is done by human to harm others. Charity, volunteer, sacrifice; we associate these acts as good. However, have you ever actually asked, why do we think these things are bad or good? Why we prefer certain things to others? How we categorise these acts?

Asking about moral is always an interesting question. There are always a lot of questions and speculations about why we consider some things to be good, and some others to be bad. Does these preferences always stay inside our brain, or does it actually taught to us by our ancestor?

First, Back to The Survival

Survival is always the goal of our individualistic life, as I have said in many other episodes before. To achieve this goal, most of the time we need to be able to cooperate with the other people, to make sure all of the member of the community have the same point of view, and doing so achieve the common goal: survival.

To be able to manifest this idea, some things need to be done. And the first step is building trust. If you want to work with others, you need to make sure that you believe your partner. It could be a friend, a work partner, or even a life partner. It all starts with a single trust, and you build upon it every time. By putting our trust onto someone, we have less fear that these people will cause harm to us.

In the harshest way possible, at least we have no fear that they would kill us. This is where our morality came from. It was so simple at the beginning: "if it does bad to our survival chance, then it is bad." Of course this rooted a long long time ago, before the situation escalated quickly and we need justice system to rule our society.

Secondly, Education.

Everything we do is just a manifestation of our need to survive, it could be subtle in a lot of cases, but it is still a survival effort. Once a society and a set of rule is established, we just need to keep on going. On top of that, we could do more cooperations with each other, and by then we could continue with our life.

The next step is how we could make sure that this way of life keep going to our descendants? This is where everything connects to the last post (Why We Found Comfort In Religion, click here for reading). As I have said, children may have not yet understood why we need to do good things, but the parents need to make sure that the children could benefit from the trust system they have built. Therefore, the challenge is to educate them.

As I have mentioned in the previous post, one of the most powerful way to teach innocent children who have no understanding about good and bad is a higher power. A higher power who always monitors us every time, gave us this set of rule about what are good and what are bad, a higher power who will punish humans if we do something bad.

With a lure that they will earn a special place afterlife (re:heaven), innocent children would believe this and keep doing these good things, with a hope that after their life on earth, they would get a prize on the uncertain afterlife.

People Who Break Free

You may ask, if people use God to teach about moral, why do a lot of good atheist people exist: people who do not believe that there is a higher power, but they still do good? What are their intentions?

In my personal opinion, these people have a different understanding than the most religious people. Most religious people think that doing certain good things is for their own sake, so they will earn a prize afterlife. I am not saying that this is a general case, but from my own experience, a lot of people that I talked with think this way.

In the other hand, some people think a totally different way. No, not about karma. Some people do indeed think about karma, that doing some good things with a hope with other people will do the same, and doing bad things will come back at them. To make sure, this way of thinking is not the wrong way, since in my opinion there is no certain line about what way of thinking is right or wrong.

However, I want to highlight people who do good because they indeed realise that they are living in a society together with other 7 billions people, and doing good to others mean creating progress in our society.

We do not care if other people will do the same thing to us (I mean, i would totally hope no one would want to kill me), but what important is just doing good for the sake of our humanity. We don't help people because we will get a prize in heaven, we don't even sure if there is one, but what we are sure is that by doing these things, people could have a better life and we will have a better society.

A Higher Level Unlocked

In my personal opinion, this way of thinking is higher than the conventional religious way, in a sense that once you live your life so you do good for the sake of others, you cannot go back to the conventional religious way. Indeed you may still think that there is a heaven waiting for you, but you cannot unthink about doing good for the sake of others.

I would say this a mature way of thinking about our goal has humans. Why mature? Same as your growth: once you are an adult, you won't be a child anymore. There is no way to forget about your maturity. Once you understand to do good for others, this thought will stay in your mind forever.

Doing good is indeed a manifestation of our survival instinct, and in the end from this point of view we could actually conclude that it is religions that were built around this set of rules that we call as morality. Every long-existing religions never oppose to our morality. If there are people who do bad things in the name of the religion, then it’s their own fault, not the religion’s.

Most religions are always meant to be good, to guide us along our life, and it would be ironic if it actually opposes what we need to strive and survive. This explains a lot why people could be good without a religion, since they just have a different way of thinking about the reason to act good, and morality is taught well by their parent.

Effect In Our Society

In the end, we cannot say if unlocking the idea makes us a better human, because most of the time you are judged by your actions, not your intentions. If you do good with the intention of guarantying a special place after your death, I will not blame you. If you do good because you just love doing it, of course it is not a problem.

What matters is, religion is just a way to shape our life. As I have said many times before it, a lot of people could be good without it, and some people do need it. We should not judge someone's action just because his way of thinking, it is more deeply personal and connected to someone's past and philosophy of life.

Stay safe, live well, help others.

Image credit: Linguistic Society of America