Moral Responsibility vs Christianity part 1

Morality has been my main topic since this blog started. In September and October, I explored the issue of how morality develops naturally and how Christianity clashes with that development. In November, and then on sporadically, I've looked at the issue of Christian morality from a memetic perspective. In January, I went on the offensive and discussed how to neutralize the Christian moral threat.

Since I've been saying all along that Christianity's most immediate and devastating consequence, and the main reason why we should fight against monotheism in general, is the loss of moral responsibility, perhaps it would be interesting to look at how this works.

Moral responsibility is the virtue of taking one's actions in one's own hands - that is to say, taking decisions based on one's personal values, not anyone else's, and taking the merit or blame derived from them. The opposite is to live in a state of cognitive dependence - letting other people or doctrines decide for us, and putting the merit or blame on these exterior elements instead of oneself.

When we mature, we gain the understanding that other individuals have their own minds, with their own values and opinions. We also gain the ability of understanding and dealing with this fact, being able to live side by side with, while not necessarily liking, people with different systems of value. We also learn tolerence and compassion for other people, through empathy and intermingling. These are some of the natural virtues we gain at the second level.

Moral responsibility is essential because the individual alone possesses the natural virtues needed to spark moral behaviour, as well as the capacity to validate his decisions based on proper and contextual reasoning. An exterior source cannot impart either. Therefore, to rely on such sources is to both reject our natural virtues and to reject the possibility of proper justification and standards of evidence.

What does this mean concretely ? Deliberate murder, war, terrorism, are only possible if a person rejects his natural virtues and rejects standards of evidence - and sees other human beings as tools to sacrifice for a greater ideal. While religion is certainly not needed to do this (other belief systems or simple beliefs can do just as well), religion and government are the most common corrupting belief system (the topic of government, of course, is already covered by my other blog).

So what these belief systems do, is to override these natural safeguards and understandings in our minds and use our capacity for evil for their own utilitarian good (which translates to : the unbridled interests of the religious leaders and the survival of their institutions). I've looked at the memetic aspects of this in "Memetics and Christianity", so I won't get into them again.

And after all, the doctrines of Christianity are supposed to apply to everything and everyone, therefore it has an infinite scope. Christianity tells us that we are all sinners, without exceptions, all worthless without religion. This is even more dangerous than, say, simple racist beliefs which hold that people with a skin of some hue are inferior to people of a different hue. Christianity is universal dehumanization.

In the second part, I look at the different ways in which Christianity destroys moral responsibility.