Some people find it hard to reconcile the idea of a moral life without a supreme authority of morality - a god - or without the threat of everlasting punishment. Others have the opposite reaction: how can one base morality on such concepts?
Humanism is a lifestyle without any god or authoritative scripture, so morality is not based on any of these.
Morality is something that changes through the ages. As a society we learn, we reconsider old ideas and revise our sense of what is moral and immoral.
The New Testament is a very good example of this. It contains a number of accounts in which Jesus has to find clever ways to discard the laws of the Old Testament, with the clear implication being that these were outdated.
“Let he who has no sin cast the first stone”, he says to a group of people intent on stoning an adulteress to death. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the “Sabbath,” he tells those who insisted on an overly strict interpretation of the rule prohibiting any work on the Sabbath.
Anyone who has read the Old Testament knows there are a myriad laws and accompanying penalties that would make life under ISIS look like a walk in the park by comparison. Someone caught picking up firewood on the Sabbath should be killed, as should all rebellious teenagers who disobey their parents. Talk about tough love!
At the same time, there is nowhere in the Bible where rape is condemned, not one verse. The closest is a law that says that if a man rapes a virgin he has to pay her full price to her father - and the rapist gets to keep the girl. I’m sure she’d be delighted to spend the rest of her life with her rapist.
Slavery was so commonplace that one of the first things the Hebrews did when they were released from slavery in Egypt was to slaughter another tribe - the Midianites - and enslave their young girls for themselves, and they were supposedly ordered to do this by God, via Moses. Slavery remains accepted in the Bible right even in the New Testament, where Paul instructs slaves to obey their owners as if they were obeying Jesus himself.
As a society we learn, we reconsider old ideas and revise our sense of what is moral and immoral
The problem is simple - these laws were written thousands of years ago, back when women were considered to be property to be traded, when slavery was considered normal, and when the death penalty was handed out for the smallest of infractions. Humanity grew and matured, and most laws did likewise - but once a law becomes attributed to an absolute authority, it’s difficult to change.
The gospels describe Jesus resorting to some clever sophistry in order to get around these laws without being seen as contradicting the word of God - and this is something that’s constantly happening in religion. The inhumanity that we see happening in countries like Saudi Arabia or Uganda shows what happens when someone tries to impose these outdated religious ideas in today’s world.
In general, most modern, mainstream churches and other religions have found ways of getting around these rules and embracing more humane and moral rules, but a few exceptions remain. These include the widespread discrimination against homosexuals.
In Uganda, an attempt to introduce the death penalty for gay people, spearheaded by Christian churches, was only narrowly defeated after massive international pressure. In many places, people accused of witchcraft are still being burned alive today, thanks to a mixture of belief in witchcraft together with the Biblical commandment to kill all witches.
Think about it: people are being killed today because of someone’s prejudice from over 3,000 years ago. Even in predominantly-Catholic Malta, there was a strong resistance to divorce and gay marriage primarily stemming from similar religious prejudices.
The idea that these laws are believed to have a timeless and infallible source is at the heart of the problem. If we accept that the rules of morality that we live by are created by people and can therefore be improved upon, we won’t remain stuck to rules that clearly belong in the past.
Humans are, and have always been, the source of morality, and it is through human reason that we seek to always improve ourselves.
The moral principles of humanism are fairly universal since they are not dogmatic or authoritarian but are a product of our common humanity.
They include the promotion of equality and human rights - and thus are opposed to racism, sexism, homophobia or other manners in which one group of humans seeks to treat others as inferiors.
It is not a set of commandments but rather an attitude towards others, rooted in empathy and compassion, which encourages a healthy and positive society.