My morals are not your morals.

Today, during class, we had a debate on religion and morality. I, being too shy to speak up, wrote down some points that I would have liked to say and decided to make it into a journal topic.

People are individuals, who believe different things. This is seen through different people’s views on religion. Then it must be true that people have different morals. For example, if someone withholds the truth from someone else, but is not necessarily asked specifically about that truth, are they lying? Different people will have different answers. Some believe that withholding information is lying, and others believe you must speak untrue words to lie. It’s all about perception and ultimately the person’s beliefs.

People can also perceive religion in the same way. Many religious things, such as verses from the Bible, are left up to interpretation. Especially considering over the years, the Bible has been translated from different languages, and also to modern language, there is bound to be some things that are lost in translation. I remember last year in Mrs. Bright’s sociology class, we went on a trip to the mental hospital in Toronto. There was a man who talked to us about his personal experience with schizophrenia. He mentioned that he believed one voice that he heard to be Jesus, and one was the Devil, so if the voice he believed was Jesus told him to do something, he would do it because he believed it to be Jesus speaking to him. The voice could have easily told him to kill someone, and he may have done it. Therefore morality can be overridden by other beliefs.

This leads into a point that was brought up that I disagree with. It was said during the class that if a religious person swears on the Bible, they will tell the truth. This is an incredibly untrue statement. Religious people lie just as easily as an atheist. They shouldn’t be held up to a higher standard simply because they believe that something happens when they die. In the Bible, women were stoned if they had sex before marriage, does that mean that religious people should kill all women who have pre-marital sex? To my knowledge, most do not do this, because times have changed and things are different. Who is to say they can’t bend other rules, and ask for forgiveness afterwards?

Also, the death penalty was brought up. I just want to note that I don’t believe that the death penalty is an effective punishment. Why would we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong? It doesn’t seem logical, in my opinion. Then again, who doesn’t contradict themselves these days?