The Progression of Religion and Morality on Humanity: Dawkins and Nietzsche
A Zeitgeist is the spirit or mood of a particular time in history based on the ideas and beliefs of that time. This concept of a moral zeitgeist becomes the overall focus of the writings of both Dawkins and Nietzsche as they try to illustrate the relationship between religion and morals. In the God Delusion, Dawkins focuses on the evolution of the moral zeitgeist noting how the mentality of humanity has changed due to the times, and that humanity must come up with a new set of 10 commandments, because the ways of the past no longer work in the present. Nietzsche however, focuses solely on the origin of the zeitgeist and how it has come to challenge humanity to be greater. In this essay I will illustrate the unique perspectives Dawkins and Nietzsche present on the idea that religion is one of the great sources of morality for human cultures.
“In any society there exists a somewhat mysterious consensus, which changes over the decades, and for which it is not pretentious to use the German-loan-word Zeitgeists (spirit of the times)” (Dawkins, the God Delusion, p. 301). The story Dawkins tells of the Modern Moral Zeitgeist is much different than that from biblical times remarking "the point is that we have almost all moved on, and in a big way, since biblical times" (Dawkins, the God Delusion, p. 300) and Dawkins notes that this Zeitgeist is different because as time goes on we develop more and more polite circles. As Dawkins has made clear, everything comes from evolution, or happens because of evolution; humans want to have good morals to establish a good reputation as a means to propagate their genes. In the God Delusion, Dawkins focuses on the evolution of...
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...sters. He remarks how Christians often fault God by blaming these events on God’s wrath when in reality it can be explained by science. He then goes on to illustrate how the commandments are only specific to the person that the book is written for, which ultimately makes our morals irrelevant to us, as they were only written for a specific person. This is similar to Nietzsche because he discusses how the eagles don’t treat the sheep right and how the Jews treated others because Jesus’ in crowd was Jewish. Both authors are saying that religion is not an aid it is an excuse, if you are looking for morals you shouldn’t go to the bible or to religion because you will not find any good morals. If humanity does choose to go back to the bible to find meaning and morals then a slave morality will be created and humanity will forever be doomed as passive, boring individuals.
In the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (titled ““Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and the Like”), Nietzsche formulates an interesting conception of the origin and function of guilt feelings and “bad conscience.” Nietzsche’s discussion of this topic is rather sophisticated and includes sub-arguments for the ancient equivalence of the concepts of debt and guilt and the existence of an instinctive joy in cruelty in human beings, as well as a hypothesis concerning the origin of civilization, a critique of Christianity, and a comparison of Christianity to ancient Greek religion. In this essay, I will attempt to distill these arguments to their essential points.
Mere Christianity is divided into four books or sections that build and expand off of the prior. The first book is entitled “Right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe” and he examines the common understanding among all men of a universal moral law hardwired in the minds of men. He begins this examination with a presentation of man’s concept of right and wrong. The simplest understanding among all men is the concept of fairness. This fair play points to a law and can be seen in the reactions of mankind to justice and injustice. He contrasts this moral law, the Law of Human Nature, with the law of nature found in the world. The mind of the moral relativist denies such standards yet fail to recognize their call for fairness as a fatal flaw in their reasoning.
The three essays that make up On The Genealogy of Morals each deal with a certain stage of cultural development of morality. In order to establish chronology, the second section should precede the first, as noted by Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995) . Essay I deals with the origins of "good" and "bad" as pertaining to the master and slave moralities. Essay II delves into the origin of guilt and bad conscience, while Essay III offers a discussion of the "ascetic ideal." I will concern myself only with the second phase of morality (Essay I), as it encompasses important aspects of the other two, but I will later give a brief discussion of Essays II and III in light of the explanation of the very origin of morality that Nietzsche is out to disprove.
Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality reflects upon and questions the progression of human morality. An excerpt from the “Preface” of Genealogy of Morality on page 393, suggests that the value placed on what is considered “good” or “bad” is susceptible to evolution; there are no absolute truths in a meaning, only a will to power. Nietzsche’s philosophy is often saturated with dismantling assumptions, absolutions, and arbitrations. In this sense, when people confine their morality to assumptions and absolutions they conform to one power, one perspective, one will that wishes to dominate. This philosophy is communicated by imploring what Nietzsche says about the creation of truth in On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense and the concepts of good
The “Roaring Twenties” was a time period known for its innovation. Skirts got shorter, teens got bolder, and Prohibition was in full swing. These changes also gave way to a time period full of religious conflict. “In [religious] minds, Prohibition had always been about more than alcohol. It represented an effort to defend traditional American values against the growing influence of an urban, cosmopolitan culture” (Gillon 152). Charles Darwin had published his book, The Evolution of Species, in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, detailing the evolution of man from ape-like creatures. When A Civic Biology, a biology textbook containing information on evolution, was published in 1914, teachers around the country began using it in their courses. By the twenties, these books had sparked all sorts of new ideas regarding the origin of man as well as opposition due to the creature from which he claimed we evolved and to the disagr...
“Death to God, all hail reason!”, cries out the secular world, fervent for nothing but themselves. The new age of skepticism has come, ushered in by God-hating men and dictators bound to satan; and its zealots follow in the footsteps of the rest of the world. They lay down cheerfully in valleys of dry bones and their banner stands, waving through air that is choked by the smoke that rises from their fathers burning in Hell, its motto, “Love and Tolerance.” Words bought by the blood of anyone who dissented. This is the fruit of the religion of Atheism.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality” includes his theory on man’s development of “bad conscience.” Nietzsche believes that when transitioning from a free-roaming individual to a member of a community, man had to suppress his “will to power,” his natural “instinct of freedom”(59). The governing community threatened its members with punishment for violation of its laws, its “morality of customs,” thereby creating a uniform and predictable man (36). With fear of punishment curtailing his behavior, man was no longer allowed the freedom to indulge his every instinct. He turned his aggressive focus inward, became ashamed of his natural animal instincts, judged himself as inherently evil, and developed a bad conscience (46). Throughout the work, Nietzsche uses decidedly negative terms to describe “bad conscience,” calling it ugly (59), a sickness (60), or an illness (56); leading some to assume that he views “bad conscience” as a bad thing. However, Nietzsche hints at a different view when calling bad conscience a “sickness rather like pregnancy” (60). This analogy equates the pain and suffering of a pregnant woman to the suffering of man when his instincts are repressed. Therefore, just as the pain of pregnancy gives birth to something joyful, Nietzsche’s analogy implies that the negative state of bad conscience may also “give birth” to something positive. Nietzsche hopes for the birth of the “sovereign individual” – a man who is autonomous, not indebted to the morality of custom, and who has regained his free will. An examination of Nietzsche’s theory on the evolution of man’s bad conscience will reveal: even though bad conscience has caused man to turn against himself and has resulted in the stagnation of his will, Ni...
Towards the end of Part I Michael goes into detail about how people tend to have a hard time accepting what they don 't understand. Science has proven that human beings have a hard time feeling empathy towards groups and people that are different from us .Which causes us to feel the need to exclude, punish, and even kill those who are different. In order to prevent this from shrinking the moral sphere we have to attempt to provide people with enough information so that they can better understand religions, ethnicities, and preferences that are different from their own to provide a better understanding of one another and unify all beings under a continuously growing moral arc. Despite the majority of people deriving their moral dos and don’ts from their religions, Shermer reveals why this isn’t a good idea. He informs the reader that religion cannot be the driver of moral progress because it is based on only showing morality to those who participate in the same religious beliefs. This exclusive attitude that religion seems to exude can be seen in one of the most significant items that laid that the very foundation for Christianity, the bible. The bible is widely known for its commandments that portray good morals and rules that
In Western society and culture, religion and morality have often intertwined and they have reflected their values onto each other. Today it is sometimes impossible to make a distinction between the two, since their influence has transcended generations. In modern Western culture, religion and society preach conformity. In order to be a “good” person, one must conform to the values imposed by the church1 and state.
Friedrich Nietzsche is recognized for being one of the most influential German philosophers of the modern era. He is known for his works on genealogy of morality, which is a way to study values and concepts. In Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche mentions that values and concepts have a history because of the many different meanings that come with it. Nietzsche focused on traditional ethical theories, especially those rooted in religion. Not being a religious man, he believed that human life has no moral purpose except for the significance that human beings give it. People from different backgrounds and circumstances in history bend morality's meaning, making it cater to the norms of their society. For example, the concept of what is "good" in the ancient Greek culture meant aristocratic, noble, powerful, wealthy, pure, but not in modern era. Meaning, in the past the term “good” was not applied to a kind of act that someone did but rather applied to the kind of person and background they had. Nietzsche’s project was to help expand one’s understanding by re-examining morality through genealogy of morality; helping one to be more aware of a potential confusion in moral thinking. He feels that the current values and concepts that have been instilled into a society are a reversal of the truth, forcing him to believe that one’s moral systems had to have been created within society. In the works of genealogy of morality, Nietzsche traces out the origins of the concepts of guilt and bad conscience, which will be the main focal point, and explaining its role in Nietzsche’s project against morality. It will be argued that guilt and bad conscience goes against Nietzsche’s role against morality because it can conflict with the moral co...
Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve, 2007. Print.
The second reason to act morally is because there is religion. Sometimes moral codes are obtained by theologians who clarify holy books, like the Bible in Christianity, the Torah in Judaism, and the Qur 'an in Islam. Their conclusions are often accepted as absolute by their believers. Those who believe in God view him as the supreme law giver; a God to whom we owe obedience and allegiance. In other words, they think that being a good person is one who obey god by following his commandments. Religion helps people to judge whether a certain act is good or bad, which can be considered as the definition of morality. Most religions promote the same values which are: fairness, loyalty, honesty, trust, etc.... Similarly, McGinn lists the same qualities
What is morality? There are many different views on what morality really is, but the one I find to be closest to the truth is Nietzsche’s view. Nietzsche completely reevaluated all of the values tied to morality and concluded that there is little true value in this world. Morality has always seemed to be complex and always been kept in a very limited “box”. Nietzsche goes beyond the normal limits and out of the “box” morality has been kept in. Nietzsche believed that there is no truth, just beliefs. Morality is just another belief. All beliefs are just interpretations or ways of looking at the world. Everything is a perspective. How I might view morality or what I might consider to be moral may be and probably will be very different from how someone else’s views. Nietzsche does not think we truly understand morality or the history of it. This is primarily where he believes other philosophers have gone wrong when trying to understand and describe what morality is. Nietzsche says, “As is the hallowed custom with philosophers, the thinking of all them is by nature unhistorical…” (Nietzsche, 25). Nietzsche believed that historically there were two types of morality: slave morality and master morality. Nietzsche says that, “It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values…” (Nietzsche, 26). How we view morality now along with many other things has changed over the course of time. Nietzsche calls this conceptual transformation. Nietzsche says, “Thus one also imagined that punishment was devised for punishment. But purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function…” (Nie...
We need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined?. [What if] morality itself were to blame if man, as a species, never reached his highest potential power and splendour? [GM P 6]
If individuals see that choosing morality is beneficial and brings happiness, they will make that choice, which then leads to that individual or group continuing on in society rather than “dying out,” as others would. In addition, individuals can see that choosing moral or ethical actions not only improves them as individuals, but can improve society. For example, when an individual makes the ethical choice to participate in social justice, the community as a whole experiences justice, making the individual feel better and helping improve the society. Therefore, not only can ethics be tied to evolution in how ethics developed within humanity, but choosing to be ethical or unethical provides an evolutionary advantage for those individuals within society. As a result, the moral and ethical decisions made by individuals, which can be explained through social Darwinism, have helped to shape society, its basic morality, and what is expected of individuals in various societies all over the world.