The Relationship Between Morality and Religion. Essay examples

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What is the relationship between religion and morality? It is in my opinion that religion is dependant on morality and not the other way around. Through this, it can be stated that morality reinforces the development and evolution of religion. In this essay, I shall show that this is the case drawing from theories proposed by Plato, Kant and Berg.

According to Jonathan Berg, “…a way to construe ethics as depending on religion would be on the basis of a ‘Divine Command Theory’ of ethics, identifying the moral good with God’s Will or with what God commands.”(1) So then, if one were to link doing good as essentially doing God’s will, does this mean that one must always obey God’s will eventhough it may not seem to be a good act to us? …show more content…
Indeed, it would be much easier for a religion to be accepted if its teachings resonate with the moral code of a society. For example, if a religion where it is perfectly fine to abandon a baby because it is deformed is introduced into a society where this act of abandoning the infant is frowned upon or even enough to be punished for, said religion would be hard-pressed to survive.

As stated by Berg, “…while an act’s being good or not may have nothing to do with God, our knowing whether it is good or not might depend on God.”(6) However, this cannot explain the existence of moral atheists. Atheists do not believe in God and if the above statement is true, we would have, on our hands, a large number of people who would gleefully do unscrupulous things without hesitation. For, if one does not believe in God, there would be no knowledge of good. Subsequently, performing a good act would be a worthless thing to do. But our world is not filled with these morally depraved non-believers, is it? So it is clear that one can still be a perfectly moral person even if one doesn’t believe in the existence of God.

As the world’s view on what is morally acceptable or unacceptable changes, they will, more often than not, be reflected in our religions. For example, homosexuality, in the context of the Christian religion, is perceived as a sin and even during a time when people were able to perform sexual acts with those of the same gender without fear of
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