Do No Evil: Ethics with Applications to Economic Theory and Business

A while back I read an excerpt from Michael E. Berumen's book, "Do No Evil: Ethics with Applications to Economic Theory and Business," about his thoughts on the Religious Mind. Berumen makes the following observations about this scariest of topics.

“It seems to me that people of a religious bent are especially apt to confuse their beliefs with understanding or knowledge. Things are thought to be true simply because they believe or desire them to be true…”

To be fair, we all do this don’t we? The difference is when people do this on non-religious subjects, it’s considered correct to criticize them for it, but when it’s applied to religion, we’re supposed to admire the individual’s “faith.”

“To my mind, there are several principal features of the religious temperament that stand out more than others, namely, fear of the unknown and a need for certainty…”

We’re all afraid of the unknown. It’s a natural human emotion and generally a pretty darn good instinct that can keep us out of harm's way. The problem is that our only real advantages are our intelligence and our ability to reason. When we allow our fears to cripple those advantages, we’re asking for trouble.

“A hallmark of the religious mind is what appears to be an overwhelming need to have others believe the same things… By their very existence, nonbelievers, deviants, and apostates shake a believer's confidence in his view of the world, which he finds wholly intolerable.”

Again, this is normal human nature, but the mark of a civilized society is the ability to accept differences and plurality as a sign of strength rather than as a threat. This is the fundamental conflict at the core of a believer who lives in a western democratic society.

His religion is telling him one thing and his secular society is telling him something totally different. Often, with little or no justification, the two get merged in the mind in order to resolve the conflict. A perfect example of this is when Martin Luther King defined a “just law” in terms of “the law of God” in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. But what is this “law of God” that King spoke of? Inevitably it is the moral code established by men and then justified by attributing it to God.

The fiction of plurality and tolerance is maintained only as long as the non-believers “respect” religion. The Islamic Fundamentalist’s uproar over the Danish Cartoons and the Christian Fundamentalist’s ongoing assault upon evolution illustrates the potential reaction when non-believers are, according to the believer, “disrespectful.” How far behind then is interpreting non-belief itself as “disrespectful” or “blasphemous?”

“They, of course, confuse piety with morality…”

Yes they do, and I’ll go further than that, they define piety as one aspect of morality.

Yet the definition of piety depends upon the nature of one’s god(s) doesn’t it? The Romans not only equated piety to morality but to good citizenship as well. The gods blessed the state and all good Romans were expected to honor the gods in return. A failure to do so was considered treason. The Romans had no problem with you honoring your own god(s) as well, as long as you respected the gods of the state. These are the “certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire” that King, and other Christians, believe early Christians were justified in disobeying. Why? Well, simply because of a clash in the definition of “piety.”

Religion, and especially Christianity, is loud about their having the moral high ground. If you challenge them on this they will inevitably point to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Yet there are a dozen interpretations of the sermon, none of which propose that you should follow it literally regardless of the consequences. In other words, Jesus’ teachings are followed selectively. Who does the selecting? Why men do of course. You’ll excuse me if I’m not impressed.