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Is Morality Religious?

Religion and Morality


From the beginning of the Abrahamic faiths and of Greek philosophy, religion and morality have been closely intertwined. This is true whether we go back within Greek philosophy or within Christianity and Judaism and Islam. Morality and religion have been inseparable until very recently, and that our moral vocabulary is still deeply infused with this history

This claim within the present compass, cannot aspire to be comprehensive unless one goes to Darwin and moral so called foundations which are no more than the propogation of the species.

Etymologically, the term ‘moral’ comes from the Latin mos, which means custom or habit, and it is a translation of the Greek ethos, which means roughly the same thing, and is the origin of the term ‘ethics’. In contemporary non-technical use, the two terms are more or less interchangeable, though ‘ethics’ has slightly more flavor of theory, and has been associated with the prescribed practice of various professions (e.g., medical ethics, etc.). In any case, this entry will assume that morality is a set of customs and habits that shape how we think about how we should live or about what is a good human life.

Is  traditional Christianity just one more convention making authentic existence more difficult? as 'thou shalt not' is still abiding.

Jean Paul Sartre believed  that we have realized that humans give themselves their own essences (‘First of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.
 One form of bad faith is to pretend that there is a God who is giving us our tasks. Another is to pretend that there is a ‘human nature’ that is doing the same thing. To live authentically is to realize both that we create these tasks for ourselves, and that they are futile.

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