As someone who was raised Catholic and is now agnostic, I found the arguments made in the podcast and the reading incredibly interesting. Although I know that this is not true for all Catholics, I was pushed into Catholicism by someone who used their religion as a get-out-of-jail-free card for all of their morally questionable actions. We usually went to church twice a week, all of us were baptized, and we kept very far away from the mortal sins so we would be allowed into heaven no matter what else we did. This is, obviously, an intense normative framework that (in my incredibly biased opinion) eliminates any concept of free-will or self-determination of morals and virtues. Rather than logically determining if something is good or bad for myself, (though consequentialism, doenticism, or Aretaicism), the priests told me what would get me into heaven and I was expected to follow their directives without question. This is just my experience and it does not necessarily characterize the Catholic church as a whole, but in my view, the overbearing normative framework surrounding many religious institutions can lead to the inability to think for ones’ self and force someone to become a follower in the truest sense. (Sorry for any religious folks out there this is not meant to offend and is just my opinion! Please debate and discuss at will!)<\/p>\n
For the reasons above, I personally lean towards a more relative framework that would teach citizens to evaluate morality for themselves. Although it might be idealistic, I believe that allowing people to wrestle with, contemplate, and understand\u00a0why\u00a0<\/em>something is good or bad will make society more empathetic and intelligent as a whole. I don’t think that true relativism could work in any society because it would lead to literal anarchy, but I believe that blind followership is incredibly problematic as well. Those who have studied psychology may remember Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development, in which the highest tier of development is following your personal morals based on your own values, save for a few widely accepted rights and wrongs. I agree with Kohlberg’s assessment, but know that it would be utopian to assume that this could be applicable to society generally speaking. Therefore, I believe that there should be a moderately relative framework for society with normative concepts that emphasize empathy and compassion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As someone who was raised Catholic and is now agnostic, I found the arguments made in the podcast and the reading incredibly interesting. Although I know that this is not true for all Catholics, I was pushed into Catholicism by someone who used their religion as a get-out-of-jail-free card for all of their morally questionable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5104,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6092"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6105,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6092\/revisions\/6105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}