Jordan Peterson - Can we be Moral Without Religion?

[colinjava]

Someone asked him 20 years ago if he wanted a coffee, he's still trying to answer the question now

[johnkingston]

Not a psychologist but this is what I think.

Religion is just an extension of culture which is just an extension of human tribal psychology. Human morality is based upon human base tribal psychological tendencies. This doesn't make them law and, instead, they act as guidelines.

Humans are naturally social creatures who have developed psychologically to depend upon one another in a tribal setting. Therefore, they generally don't, without purpose, kill each other.

Humans have historically killed each other for a plethora of reasons (self-defence, resources, revenge, preproduction, etc.) It's less about what's right and wrong and more about what a person believes is best for them. Legislating crimes is just humans codifying cultural taboos and enforcing them in a wider setting (countries are just massive tribes).

[chrisbilling]

Girlfriend: "did u cheat on me?"
Me: 3:03

[partykitstudio]

COME ON MAN! JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION!!

[odinviken]

Good and bad feelings come from nature. We know that elephants are more emotionally complex than cats. Humans are even more complex, and we have for tens of thousands of years structured our tribes around what we feel are good and bad actions. The abrahamic religions did the same, but added a dimension of a universal authoritarian force, distancing us from the natural aspect and forcing upon us a divine explanation.

[DarthAnimal]

This man just spent 5 minutes saying words without any meaning behind them, holy shit

"Morality and Religion are too complex to talk about', there, I saved you the time

[zidneya]

You don't need religion to have morals. If you can't determine right from wrong then you lack empathy, not religion.

[samsendar]

A lot of Christian "morality" is nothing but PRUDISM anyway, which I think people can really DO WITHOUT.

[GrubKiller]

Because religion and morality has strings attached to each other. Religion in its most archaic sense was morality manifesting itself. It also applies to the word "culture." Because religion, culture, and morality were at some point the same things within a given culture. You never realized that there were different social rules/norms unless you had stepped out into another land inhabited by strangers.

Only in the 21st century have we become intellectual enough to abstract and think that these three things are necessarily different things.

[Galvaxatron]

Just answer the damn question, Jordan!

[hebera.carrillo]

Reading the comments just tells me that most of you didn't understand what he said.

[Its_Just_Max_]

guy talks a lot and never answers anything, yet people still think he’s smart.

[isaacgates]

I'm wondering where this assumption that you can be moral with religion is coming from. Most Christians would say that Islam is immoral and vice versa. It depends what you mean by moral as well. Most consider murder to be immoral, unless it's within the context of war, or the death penalty, or to eat an animal. The religious would say that God decides what is moral and what is not, but what's there to make sure that God is moral. Nothing. Morality is very loosely defined outside the confines of one specific ideology. The theocrats say it's what God has said in their religious text, the humanists say it is what promotes the well being of all humanity, Buddhists say that it is what reduces suffering and so on. Unless we can all agree on what morality is then it is impossible to figure out which system is most moral.

When people ask "can we be moral without religion?" they should really ask "can we have a moral ideology by which we live our lives without religion?", maybe the reason nobody asks that is because the answer is obviously yes. If we assume that religion is moral than the answer to the initial question is no, since the ideologies would be contradictory.

I feel like this was kind of rambley but I don't currently have the time to rake through it. So I'll leave it at that.

[KingAries]

Yes we can I think religion is actually not very moral. Murder is bad but starting a war in the name of your god is acceptable. We are moral without religion we just use religion to justify are morals

[albertmoore]

Can we be moral with religion? That should be the question. Can we avoid the suspicion, judgement and prejudice against others brought on by discrete religious affiliations and beliefs? Most religions are, by nature, exclusionary and divisive. That is one of the basic moral dilemmas of mankind. Divided by differing beliefs, millions of people have been murdered, imprisoned or controlled over the centuries through religious wars and persecution. It doesn't get much more immoral than that.

[ThumpingThromnambular]

I think I get what he means, though I understand why someone would say he dodged it.

Religion and morality ARE very hard to tie to eachother since religion concerns itself with much more than morality (depending on your definition), and morality
itself is a very vague idea. Something like 'Would we consider life important without religion?' is another way to see it.

I feel like Peterson did something good here in saying it's not simple to answer a question like that in this medium, and said that the search for the truth to that question would
require 'deconstruction'.

However, maybe if he demonstrated one example of such a deconstruction, people would be more satisfied.

[sozeytozey]

Obviously you can be moral without religion. Religion isn’t the decider of what’s moral and what isn’t. It’s a collection of moral ideas. So you can have the morals of religion without religion.

[lamalamalex]

there is a group, who, perhaps, bears a graver responsibility still: the psychologists and psychiatrists who see the human wreckage of these doctrines, but who remain silent and do not protest—who declare that philosophical and moral issues do not concern them, that science cannot pronounce value judgements—who shrug off professional obligations with the assertion that a rational code of morality is impossible, and, by their silence, lend their sanction to spiritual murder.”—The Virtue of Selfishness.

[_Everyone__]

Can we have law and order without religion? Yes we can! The end. The sense of morality also comes from empathy, which exist plentiful without the notion of any Divine entities, or Bovine if your Indian.

[harveybaldry]

If only Christopher Hitchens were alive to debate this man