Morality and Religion Debate

Morality and Religion Debate

In an organized religion debate, Alan Dershowitz and Alan Keyes contended many issues on religion and morality. Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, believed that "morality can be maintained without religion." He also stated that it must be maintained without religion because times have changed. He said that if religion is not separated from state it could have severe damage, such as the Crusades and the Holocaust. Dershowitz believes that there is a difference between morality and religion. When people are moral without religion, they are being virtuous on their own, not because they are afraid of God. He stated that religion should not consist of a Cost-Benefit Analysis. Alan Keyes, a former Republican presidential candidate, stated that religion sets the standard for what's moral. Keyes argued "power only ultimately respects another power," and Martin Luther King Jr. was not a preacher by accident. Dershowitz also stated that not everything in the Bible should be believed word-for-word, even George Washington said "indulge religion with caution." Keyes believed that if state and religion should be separated, then why does the Declaration of Independence contain so much about religion? Alan Dershowitz and Alan Keyes would have argued endlessly about religion's role in society if there were not a moderator to stop them.

Religion and morality exist together in parallel according to Alan Keyes. Alan Dershowitz stated that if religion and morality are not separated, it could have negative discourse. James Fowler followed Piaget, Kohlberg, and Erickson when selecting the stages to his development of faith across the life span. These three men all selected different ways to look at religio...

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...r comes from wisdom and learning what is moral and immoral. I also believe that morality is different than religion. Morality is when you do something because it is right, not because someone higher is going to judge you. Another strong point of Alan Dershowitz, was the use of examples when religion and morality were connected and what happened. The Holocaust and the Crusades are horrific examples of when the Bible has gone wrong. Unfortunately, at that time, the people were not aware of how horrible it was, and it caused many deaths. Today, we are more conscious of what is immoral, and we have learned not to accept what is blatantly wrong just because a higher power is behind it. I believe that the Bible should be used in certain situations, such as to rise hopes among the dreary, but it should not be used to maintain a twenty-first century government's morality.