Perverse Morality

A few days ago, I wrote about Excessive Morality: the idea that too many rules spoil the religion (those word are from desipundit). But what about truly perverse morality: a “morality” that is not moral in any sense but pure madness. It can happen. People can be so intoxicated by religion that they because suicide bombers and kill themselves, many innocents, and whatever cause they were “fighting” for.

Sepia Mutiny has a very interesting post about the people who are suspected of causing the London Attacks.

Hussain was described by friends in Leeds as a tearaway. He drank and dated British women before being sent to Pakistan to visit relations. On his return he was said to have become a devout Muslim, turning his back on his previous life.

Read the Times article. Read the Sepia Mutiny post.

In my post a few a days ago, I joked that Muslims should drink more beer, but here is someone who really needed to drink more beer. Apparently, he was an empty vessel and this void was filled with murderous fanaticism.

What is truly scary is that he was not from some backward country that was ruled by evil zealots; he came from a great free society. That this madness could spring from such soil should make us all ponder. To what extent are we immune or susceptible to this madness? Is this unique to Islam (is it an inherently antisocial religion? - I don't believe so) or is it possible whenever zealotry is tolerated (I believe it is the latter, obviously)?

A deeper question is, “Is religion evil?” I would have never imagined that people would follow a truly evil religion, but are all religions essentially evil because the base their morality on a pure fiction: “What God had commanded us to do”? I would insist that this is a fiction because there is no possible way we human could ever know the difference between what the true God of the Universe would want vs. what some pretender says that the true God of the Universe would want. The essence of faith is to suspend the common sense that is critical in good judgment everywhere else in life. Is faith criminal folly?

I am not at all comfortable with the belief that faith is always criminal folly, but it clearly can be for some people. I always used to believe that people’s morality didn’t really come from reading the holy books but came from people’s common sense, and I still believe this is true for the most part. Religious people generally are simply people who care a lot about others and would like us to live more harmoniously (perhaps they should become economists). But they need the crutch of the almighty deity to justify their notions of morality. There is clearly a danger in this.

On the other hand, if we all abandon our faiths, would we all become amoral uncooperative game theorists? I really wouldn’t want to spend my life in “Non-Cooperative Game Theory Land,” with a bunch of people who really played life like that. The world could use a new religion, but the religions of the world are usually created by people who claim to have talked directly to The God of The Universe. Typically such people lack credibility and probably lack sanity as well.

Could a religion exist merely as a code of ethics without the superstitious mumbo-jumbo?