Yes, well two things.
Firstly I purposely avoided the merits of, and origins of god and religion etc so as not to deviate from the main thought i was exploring - society post religion or order.
Secondly I take your point but I think the crucial element that I have failed to explain properly is that I'm considering these things in a society that was, prior to its secular state, heavily reliant on religion for guidance. So the transition that society would experience from the simplicity of being offerred clearly defined answers to a world of uncertainty and no answers is the factor i'm considering.
Our society becoming more secular is
often only seen as a result of progress, and evolution (within academic circles). But aside from the debate of the pros and cons of that actuality, there's also another thing worth considering. Whether we arrived at this secular society through beliefs or by enforced dogma
- A secular environment could have, as one example, evolved to serve a political or social elite, with dogma, trend, academic biases filtering into systems of education, or distractions (entertainment) etc creating a societal acceptence that religion or faith has been all but disproved.
So just because a society is secular in disposition, it doesn't mean it arrived there by slick mastery of the great philisophical questions. With that in mind, if we continued with the same level of
. In varying degrees we have emotional responses to acts committed upon our fellows. — charleton
Yes, that is the individual's morality. The collective morality is built on cross sections of experience, history, increased intelligence, local and globalised needs, protecting a society's progress and order, to name a few. The collective morality is far more vague, and in a constant state of flux. But it is there. For example I don't think there's a reasonable argument within any fraction of humanity that disputes that killing innocent people for fun is morally sound. Nor would I think there's any fraction that would contest that helping another person for the sole purpose of improving that person's life, with no harmful consequences arising from the action, is morally sound.
So there is, albeit murky in the middle, a frame of collective morality, however it came to be. So there are examples of actions that can be universally agreed upon that are moral or immoral, even if my above ones have holes I failed to see. This range, this spectrum is what I would see as shifting without religion in the mix. And the baseline of what's morally abhorrent could drop in a world jolted into a state of anomie. And this would be a real possibility if reliigion and meaning waned at a faster rate than we could evolve to understand a world without it.
I
The invention of god was nothing more than a system to codify behaviour. We still have the law of the land which places our rewards and punishments to a more immediate and pragmatic level. And it is here that our 'collective morality' resides. No different from any time since the invention of god, except that the law of the land do not involve the lie of the supernatural. — charleton
Whether you believe in god or not, and whether the world will be better or worse without religion is not pertinent to my points. I'm exploring the implications of how a transition from a world with religion to one without would have on the range within our universal moral code would sit.
If there was a wave of secularism across the educated population, and the trickle down effects reached the disadvantaged majority of humanity, who may accept their fate based on the assumption of order, then (and this was my original assumption) people who developed their individual moral code with respect to the collective moral code, could grow less loyal to a collective morality. Without the optimism or hope of there being reason for a person's pain, there lays the foundation for asking questions that lead to nonacceptance of the status quo (enter the central point I found interesting)
This happening at an individual level then affecting the collective's response to the status quo. We can look at how this could lead to every man for himself, and the lowering of the baseline of what is considered unacceptable, and I thought that this was the mainly represent outcome.
But optimistically I looked at the flip side, and thought about ways this could be a positive change.(remember i'm not talking about a circumstance where we are all living in equality and that we became civilized and efficient and secular as a result. I'm considering the not so distant future where the inequality of the world weighs heavily on the larger percentage of people.)
And one potential positive by product of the change in our understanding of order or meaning is that we could realize that the "reason" or "order" we relied on to accept our place in the world have been shackles as well as anchors, and that we don't have a reason to live half lives, or accept dictatorial classes etc .. People of all parts of society questioning their surroundings and why they should accept the way of things could then affect how we question our own actions. This could then reveal the abundance of hypocrisy and contradiction in our moral codes, and as people see this of their individual morality, the collective morality could improve. So an example of collective morality being addressed as a result- justifying homelessness in cities where there's an allocated budget for entertainment events that exceeds the money needed to minimize the homelessness. An individual accepts this and the collective does so. The little lies we use to accept and explain such things collectively could become highlighted in the shift of our perception of order, and in the pursuit of a better personal existence, the collective may see the unacceptability of suffering that is within our power to eradicate. That without the excuse of saying there's a reason for this beyond our own lack of action, we could develop an inerrant societal obligation in raising the baseline of the collective moral code to a level that universally perceives all suffering endured by all people unacceptable wherever we have the power to eradicate it. This could be tied in with an understanding of the merits of this to the individual as well.
God I hope that makes sense (pun intended).