John Arthur: Religion, Morality, and Conscience
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What I expect to learn:
In this chapter, I expect to learn about how morality has been thought to depend on religion.
Quote:
“Besides early moral training, moral thinking depends on our ability to imagine others’reactions and to imaginatively put ourselves into their shoes.”
Review:
In this chapter, Arthur talks about religion, morality and conscience. First, he distinguished what religion and what morality is. For him morality is more about the notions of rules, rights, and obligations. It involves our attitudes toward various forms of behavior like lying, killing and other delict acts. Also it concerns on what we know or what we think is right. On the other hand, the religion involves prayer, worship, beliefs about supernatural, institutional forms, and authoritative texts. It is more about following or believing on what way God wants us to live. On the other hand, religion and morality can be connected. There are people that say “religion is necessary so that people will do right”. Yes, I believe that religion motivates a person to act or do the right thing but that doesn’t mean that we always consider religion or we always base our actions to our religion because for me there are many factors that causes our reactions or responses in a situation. I think religion is just a factor that motivates us to do what is right. A person can be moral even without a religion. We are rational beings and we have the capacity to identify what’s good from bad. We may think of the consequences just for example, when a man wants to steal something, he may think that someone can see him, he can be caught and imprisoned and that is out of awareness or human knowledge where he doesn’t even think about his religion, instead it is out of conscience and indeed a morality of itself.
What I have learned:
I’ve learned in this chapter that both religion and morality are for good and these two will lead us to a better attitude and behavior.
Integrative questions:
- What is the difference between morality and religion?
- How can religion and morality be connected?
- How morality has been thought to depend on religion.
