Can you be a moral person without religion? Yes and no. It all depends on what you mean by \u2018moral\u2019 and what you mean by \u2018religion\u2019. What most people mean by \u2018moral\u2019 in our society is \u201cTry to be a nice person. Be normal. Have relatively good manners. Don\u2019t do any of the big bad ones like killing someone or stealing or being a pervert. Be involved in a good cause of some sort\u2013like the soup kitchen or saving the Amazonian rain forest.\u201d Morality for the post Christian masses doesn\u2019t really have anything to do with a set moral code or particular rules to follow. It is more a sense of \u2018feeling that you are a moral person\u2019. Part of this feeling \u2018moral\u2019\u00a0is tolerance of everyone else and\u00a0outrage at hypocritical Christian type people who try to force their version of \u2018morality\u2019 on others. So can you be \u2018moral\u2019 in this way without being religious? Of course. In fact true religion would be downright counterproductive to this sort of \u2018morality\u2019. But they don\u2019t mean \u2018true religion\u2019 they mean \u2018going to church.\u2019<\/p>\n
Can you be moral without going to church? Yes. Just like you can be immoral and go to church. However, there is more to it than that.<\/p>\n
What people in our society have done, of course, is to mistake \u2018amoral\u2019 for \u2018moral\u2019. This is a morality of a seeming absence of evil rather than a presence of good. This is nowhere more obvious than in the area of sexual morality. The modern person is \u2018moral\u2019 if he or she makes hardly any judgment about sexual morality. When it comes to sexuality there are few taboos. Incest, pedophilia, rape and bestiality are still frowned on, but any other sexual deviation is considered morally neutral.<\/p>\n
What this indicates is that the \u2018moral\u2019 irreligious person has great blank areas where their \u2018morality\u2019 is either missing or poorly thought through. Do \u2018moral\u2019 modern people ever think about any of the seven deadly sins, for instance? For them is gluttony immoral or just gross? Is greed immoral? Probably only when it is vulgarly displayed. Is envy immoral? What\u2019s that? Is Sloth immoral? What\u2019s that?<\/p>\n
In fact, one can be \u2018moral\u2019 without religion if one defines \u2018moral\u2019 however you wish. In fact, this being so, the irreligious moral person really has only one defining moral principle: \u201cDo what you will, but harm no one.\u201d This, of course, is the core creed of witchcraft. So can one \u00a0be \u2018moral\u2019 and not religious? In the end, No. He is still being religious. (that is he follows some sort of belief system) It\u2019s just that his belief system or religion is witchcraft rather than Christianity.<\/p>\n
Christianity demands morality and teaches morality not because it is a religion of rules, but because the rules are there to discipline us to achieve the Christ like state to which we are called. At the same time morality is the fruit of true religion. The truly moral person has stopped simply obeying rules and begins to live and love the way of life that the rules recommend. Practicing the Christian religion trains a person in morality and helps one to learn how to grow in virtue. Trying to be moral without religion is like trying to become a concert pianist by playing chopsticks over and over.<\/p>\n
This is being truly religious and truly moral..to finally be transformed by goodness into goodness\u2013St Benedict says that the monk, \u201cAfter many years doing what is right, finally does those things which he once did out of duty, out of love and joy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Can you be a moral person without religion? Yes and no. It all depends on what you mean by \u2018moral\u2019 and what you mean by \u2018religion\u2019. What most people mean by \u2018moral\u2019 in our society is \u201cTry to be a nice person. Be normal. Have relatively good manners. Don\u2019t do any of the big bad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n