Religious Cake and Rational Icing

7/21/2008
The traditional religious view, at least the one that is proposed, is that all human life is equally valuable. This proposition is false: human life is valuable as it is valuable to the evolutionary progression of genetic material. That is to say human life is only naturally important and not morally important. Traditional religious views, however, are claiming that human life is in fact morally important by virtue of being human. Evolutionarily speaking, only the life form that is most able to survive in a given environment is important, human or not. The most common atheistic viewpoint is probably that human beings are capable of being morally important because of our capability of thought and its relationship to decision-making. That is to say because we are capable of rational thought and making decisions based on that rational thought human beings must make intentionally decisions based on some kind of rational understanding rather than on arbitrary reactions or beliefs in order to be considered as moral beings.
Given that life is only necessarily evolutionarily important, there is no doubt that some problems are necessarily important only if they are related to evolution. Some problems, however are both necessary and sufficient problems, moral problems are sufficient problems because some moral problems are decisions that enable us to influence both the environment that we live in and our relationships with others. Traditional religious views tend to exclude the decision-making capabilities and their relationship to morality because of their belief that morality is determined by God. Needless to say, they exclude the evolutionary aspect as well. But, because intentional decisions are in essence choices made by individuals, traditional religious views must decide whether those decisions can create morality, or whether they are the acts determined by God. Human life, if rationality is to be taken into consideration, is only important because of the decisions we make both as individuals and as individuals within a given society (an environment).
Often morality has to do with the worthiness of life: good or bad purpose in life. The traditional religious view of the worth of human life is that all human life is equally important, but as F. Nietzsche has pointed out, typically it is those that are dependent, weaker, or simply unwilling to live independently that make such claims. Nietzsche’s claim is that those unwilling or unable to think rationally and make rational choices are those that do not see the importance of doing so. The traditional religious view of the importance of human life stems from the religious view of human life, and that view itself is at best vague and impossible to interpret and at worst contradictory. Religious viewpoints differ as to the importance of human life, but most of them claim that human life is important only because it is the gift of a god and/or that it inevitably leads to death. Both of these reasons are ludicrous because of their unwarranted evidence and ambiguity. Nevertheless, rational decision-making is at best secondary and at worst totally disregarded by most traditional religious views of morality.
But, the traditional religious view of the worth of human life is both an intentional decision that is acted upon that is directly connected to moral problems and as such can be morally judged. At first glance, traditional religious viewpoints concerning the worth of human life are at the very least in part to blame for both overpopulation and the false view that all human life is equal in moral importance, which are in fact interconnected. If intention and action based on that intention are both involved in defining a thought or action as moral or immoral, the traditional religious view, intentionally holding a falsity as truth and using deception that directly leads to detrimental effects for life itself, is immoral. To act morally or immorally is to make an intentional decision that can be held judged as well as acting in such a way that can be judged. The two go hand in hand most of the time. But traditional religious views are immoral in two ways: they promote deceptive thoughts and they promote deceptive actions based on deceptive thoughts. A person who believes, who has faith, must in many cases disregard fact because they must disregard rational thought. They must hold to deceptive thoughts in order to have faith. If they are sufficiently forced to have and follow deceptive thoughts, their actions necessarily become based on those deceptive thoughts.
For example, if I am an atheist and have the thought to be honest, then that thought can be based on my rational understanding of honesty and become moral because of that understanding. However, traditional religious views disagree with such statements because the claim is that “God knows!” Traditional religious morality is not based on actions based on rational thought but simply upon the judgment of one deity or another, which is at best arbitrary and at worst able to be “interpreted”. As a Christian, I must follow not my rational understanding but the imperatives of God.
The traditional religious viewpoint holds that human beings cannot be held accountable for their thoughts and actions as long as they have faith that God is in control: they disregard the role of rational decision-making in the defining or morality by claiming that all humans are sinful and can only be "saved" by accepting a certain belief. At the same time, they claim that human beings are held accountable by God alone for understanding that they must have faith. This seems contradictory: if one believes in God and has faith in God’s universal powers, then it would seem that he is forced, he must disregard his own capability of deciding his own future: rational decision-making plays no role in religious morality. Having faith entails that the person disregards the power of rational thought and rational decision-making for the sake of faith. Traditional religious viewpoints want their religious cake and their rational icing as well, but...well everyone knows that old adage.