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Religion and morality

Religious values and moral values

Nonmonotheistic traditions

R

eligious traditions sanction religious values. Advaita Vedanta,
Theravada Buddhism, and Jainism find the highest value in the
attainment of release from reincarnation and the achieving of
enlightenment – first a pre-enlightenment experience in this life which
guarantees a later and final enlightenment upon death.
There are various logically possible relationships between moral and
religious values. At one extreme, one might hold that the only way to
salvation was by trampling moral values under foot or, at the other, that
the only way of being morally mature was by way of rejecting all
religious values as unworthy. Pursuing either line of reasoning would
require a general discussion of the nature of morality. Here a more
modest route is taken. Our concern is with what views of morality are
available within the religious perspectives already outlined.
A key question to ask in this regard is whether moral values, as
conceived by a religious tradition, are taken up into its ultimate religious
value. What is of ultimate religious value for a tradition is gaining the
proffered cure to its diagnosed illness, or attaining salvation or
enlightenment. For Advaita Vedanta, then, however important moral
values are at the level of appearance, and however stressed it is in practice
that only the morally pure can achieve enlightenment, since morality has
no place or purchase on a qualityless Brahman, the ultimate religious
value – realization of identity with qualityless Brahman, recognition of
an identity alleged always to have held – has no moral content. Moral
virtue is at best a means to the achievement of an amoral religious
condition.
Theravada Buddhism construes the achievement of nirvana either as
annihilation altogether or at least as involving the loss of anything that
would involve the continued existence of an individual person. On this
perspective, there is comparatively little to a person at a time, or over