Ethics and Religion

In society, ethics and religion govern the way people think and reason. This governance is what guides individual behavior.  Laws in our society have been derived from ethics and religion in attempts to guide society’s behavior and conduct towards being civilized. For without ethics and religion, each individual would be ruled by their emotional needs and their own reasoning, which can be chaotic. Religion and ethics help us understand what is right and wrong, good and bad. While religion tells us what is right and what is wrong because “God” says so, ethics tells us what is right and what is wrong based on factual information, both allowing us to live with the highest form of peace. Depending on the individual, one or the other will influence the decision that a person makes. Even though it has been discovered that religion is what ruled humans since the beginning, ethics undoubtedly influenced how religion derived its rules. With time, both religion and ethics are susceptible to being regulated by the other. Currently, ethics has infiltrated all parts of society and is now used as a merit to keep things balanced and has also minimized religion’s influence in our views of what is good and bad, right and wrong. Religion offers much good, yet it is important to have a guiding principle that allows us to question a religious rule, can regulate society as a whole, and maintains equilibrium—and that guiding principle is ethics.

When we talk about ethics it is important to understand the evolution of ethics to give us an insight. There is controversy regarding when ethics evolved, and whether religion came before ethics or vise versa. To briefly touch on this matter, one of the greatest pieces of history that have enlightened modern times and proves that religion ruled people before ethics (again, ethics and religion are always intertwined whether the label “ethics” existed or not) is Aristotle’s ethics. Since religion was all people knew before and during his...